


I Shall Leave the Dead

by allthezipofnukacola



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Action/Adventure, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Future Fic, Kid Fic, M/M, Metahuman AU, Morally Ambiguous Character, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pregnancy, Sci-Fi, Sexual Content, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2020-10-12 18:51:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 25
Words: 45,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20569193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthezipofnukacola/pseuds/allthezipofnukacola
Summary: After the Minutemen rose to power and Nuka World turned its sights inward and to the West, the Commonwealth knew a time of unparalleled peace and the world almost forgot that nothing good can last.





	1. How It Goes

**Author's Note:**

> I've always been fascinated by the more bizarre/impossible elements and characters in the Fallout universe (the Dunwich building, the Sight, the Master, etc.) and wondered, "what if things only got weirder from here?" From that, this incredibly weird story was born, fueled by my love of the Fallout series and Nuka World, especially. This is a kind of weird gamble, but I saw no harm in sharing it here!

It's a story that started something like this: one day, a child woke up and did something they couldn't.

The details are lost, if they were ever known at all, the Whos and Whens of it long disintegrated with time. It doesn't matter. Never did. All that does is that, in a world of impossibilities, more had been added to the pile. The rungs and strands of already oft-sickened human DNA had begun to twist once again.

At first, it all sounded like tall tales. Stories cooked up by fraudsters, liars and drunks huddled around campfires and dive bar counters. A little girl who lived on the coast got stuck to the ceiling of her cottage. A boy in Salem who could chew through any and everything with teeth that went a mile a minute and never dulled. Some kid south of Boston proper could put his mind in other people's bodies and wear them like suits.

Nonsense, codswallop, bunkum and bullshit. All of it.

Until a little boy in Diamond City was startled by a dog and, in front of a crowd of people, dissolved like sugar in water, never to be seen or heard from again. Two months later, while his parents still tore themselves apart in grief, his neighbor's child threw a tantrum and caused every pipe in the treatment plant to burst, the water twisting into the air in ribbons. Suddenly the the loud mockery of yocal superstitions and drunk imaginings became worries whispered behind closed doors: what was happening? was it only the children? will ours be next?

Someone called Nick Valentine, the private dick held together by peeling rubber skin and rusty bolts, and, for the first time in a long time, there were no buried leads for him to unearth. The Minutemen were called next, if only because they were an authority of some kind, and the truth began to climb up the grapevine of the Commonwealth.

Wonderchildren, some called them. Miracle workers. Tenpine Bluffs, home to a twelve-year-old boy who could heal sickness with touch, became a site of desperate pilgrimage the Commonwealth over, and Kingsport Lighthouse, where a girl could call in hordes of fish from the sea, erupted into a port town that went on for miles.

For a little while, the grimmer precursors were forgotten and the Commonwealth, a decade deep into peacetime and made soft by bustling trade and advancing infrastructure, lived in a reverie. The whispers never vanished, but they were overshadowed. Four months, maybe, if that.

Then the accidents began.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (You can follow me now at allthezipofnukacola.tumblr.com)!


	2. Moira

"_Everyone has heard stories of women like us, and now we will make more of them._" - Mackenzi Lee, _The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy_

* * *

**June. 2302 AD.**

When Moira O'Seanachain was ten-years-old, she found a gap in the fence behind the Safari Zone big enough to squeeze through. Beyond it was a construction site that had long ago been stripped for parts and a massive elm tree, just on the edge.

She quickly figured out that she could reach the lowest branch by jumping from a construction ramp and, from there, climb far higher than her mother would have allowed. Further up was a hollow knot where she came to store things. Beyond a few caps she'd nicked from a park visitor, what she kept there had little value outside of her own mind: a slingshot made from a forked twig and rubber band, some stale gum, a baseball card, the lucky rabbit foot on a chain her mother had made her.

She used to wear the latter, but she had what her mother called the O'Seanachain brain, which was always _going_ and she tended to forget or lose anything that wasn't naturally attached to her. Sometimes, before she could barrel out of the amphitheater, her father would yell after her, “Hey, kid, freeze! What ya got?” and she'd stop in place and pat her pockets before turning back to get whatever it was she'd forgotten.

To forget was worse than to lose, she had decided. Forgotten things were at the mercy of her siblings and their endlessly grabbing, grubby hands. Twice she'd come home to find her rabbit's foot slippery with spit and she was pretty sure that the luck would eventually wash off if it got wet enough.

So, she hid it all away and, a few times a week, she'd vanish for a little while just to touch and admire what little she never had to share.

* * *

The rest of Moira's time was spent in her mother's shop, milling about the backstage or being bored numb by lessons in the shifty little shack the Overboss had had built years prior as a schoolhouse. Her teacher was a curt, leathery woman named Sherry with eight fingers who seemed to know everything and smacked Moira's desk when she fell asleep.

The first thing she'd ever said to her class had been, “Your godforsaken parents run every inch of this park, except here, you hear me? You come in looking for trouble and I promise you'll find it.”

She chewed tobacco that she spit into a mug and swore with the best of them and, when a boy put a radroach in her desk, Sherry dragged him out the back door by his collar and threw him face first into the swan pond.

“Go on! Run home and tell your heathen mother why you're wet!”

“She'll gut you!” he'd called back, though his voice was heavy with tears.

Nothing ever came of it. She could probably do anything, Moira thought, and never get in trouble.

Once, after she saw Sherry smoking outside of the schoolhouse, Moira went home, mimicked doing the same with a toothpick, and blew pretend smoke.

* * *

Moira's mother was the best taxidermist anywhere. Her father said so, so she knew it to be true.

“Give her a yao guai you just killed yourself and she'll make you wonder if you really did!”

Her mother had an entire indoor shop near the amphitheater, its walls covered in animal heads and tanned hides. There was a full radstag posed like it was grazing near the door and two molerats made to look like they were fighting beside the counter. Moira's earliest memories were of clinging to her mother's linen skirts as she busied about, plugging glass eyes into empty sockets and swearing at anyone trying to haggle.

By the time she was eight, Moira was holding buckets steady in the back room as her mother drained blood and scooped out guts.

“The trick,” her mother had told her, elbow deep in a dog carcass, “is to never do too much. Folks, they try to make the animal look perfect and no beast ever was. Do that and it'll end up all stiff and wrong.”

They were her favorite hours. Those and the rare ones when her siblings were elsewhere and the shop had just closed, the floor swept and the counter mopped down, and her mother would flop down into an recliner in the corner and let Moira climb in beside her.

Her mother was the most beautiful woman alive, her father said. She had wavy, red hair that went past her shoulders and green, cat-like eyes. Her skin was milky and freckles dotted the bridge of her nose. She kept a shotgun and a bowie knife behind the counter because other men, who did not know her father could have them strung up by their kneecaps, called her beautiful, too.

In those good hours, she and her mother would mostly sit in silence, Moira on her lap or, if she was heavily pregnant, curled against her side. Sometimes she'd play with Moira's hair-a wilder version of her own-and sing lilting songs in a language no one else could speak. She said they reminded her of home, the one she'd had before Nuka World and Moira's father and the five children she'd born and the sixth she carried.

“How come you don't go back?” Moira had asked once, when she was seven, her head tucked against her mother's chest and hand on her belly as Siobhán kicked inside.

“It's too far away. We had to ride a boat for nigh on half a year just to get here.”

“That's forever.”

“Aye.”

“Was it scary?”

“Scariest thing I've ever done.”

“Did you see _sharks_?”

“No, no sharks. Saw a whale though. It had six eyes and was big as a house.”

Moira had wrinkled her nose. “Nuh-uh.”

“Yuh-huh. Biggest thing I've ever seen.”

"Did you kill it?"

"We did not, no."

"I would've."

"I'm sure you would have."

“Maybe there's a faster way for you to go home.”

“Afraid not.”

“Then why'd you come here?”

“A lot of us heard life was easier this side of the ocean.”

“Is it?”

Her mother had snorted. “No. The grass is no greener.”

“You came here for grass?”

“It's just a saying.”

“Oh... But it's okay you're here, right?”

“Oh, dote, I like it wherever you are.”

“Me too!”

Moira's mother had laughed and pressed her lips to her hairline.

* * *

Three weeks before her eleventh birthday, Moira fell from the oak tree. She dropped thirty feet like a rock and struck the ground so hard nearby birds scattered. Her skull cracked like an egg and her skin split apart on impact. If her brain hadn't been crushed, her broken spine would have done it. She laid unfound on a rocky patch of earth for four hours and rose on the fifth.

Her father had noticed her gone first. The sun was setting when the last molerat had latched onto the throat of its kin and sent hot, arterial spray in a fan across cement of the fighting cage, and he'd gotten up and headed for the backstage. It was decluttered and properly furnished now, the rest of the Pack having shipped off to tend to outposts or take up space in Kiddie Kingdom and the Safari Zone over a decade ago. No chems here anymore. Guns out of reach.

“Ay, Moira?” he called, rolling a marble between his massive fingers. “Got ya something.”

Nothing.

The dressing room they'd turned into a bedroom for her and Ruaidhrí was vacant. He rapped on the twins' door. Nobody home.

“Aiden and Cillian and Siobhán are with mom,” came a small voice from behind him.

Ruaidhrí, the one kid he'd always failed to click with. He was tall and wiry for eight-years-old, with fire red hair and his mother's eyes, and was weirdly soft and thoughtful for a kid. He kept to himself and shied away from most animals, save for a ratty, one-eyed cat that had hobbled in years before. And, above all else, he hated his mother's shop. According to him, the animals felt watchful and the guts were gross.

Sinead had joked once that someone had replaced their kid with an Operator's.

“Where's Moira?”

Ruaidhrí shrugged. “Dunno.”

“When'd she leave?”

“Leave?”

“When you guys got back from school.”

“She didn't walk back with us. I think she went to the Safari Zone.”

“And she ain't been back?”

“No.”

“For fuck's- what did your ma and I tell you? You don't walk around alone.”

“Last time I told Moira that, she punched me.”

“Just stay here,” he muttered, turning heel. “Right there.”

He strolled as casually as he could out the backstage and through the gate. Everything was fine. She was at the shop. A man in a dented, pink chest plate and damp bear mask was standing guard outside and a mist of rain had started to come down.

“You see my kid any time recent?”

“Uh... which one?”

“Moira.”

“Nope.”

He strode across the dirt street, elbowing some visitor schmuck out of the way, and ducked into the shop.

“We're closing-”

“It's me.”

“Oh.” Sinead leaned her head out of the back room. “Come here to be useful for once in your life?”

“Daddy!” Siobhán shrieked, toddling determinedly forward to latch onto his leg and tug on his pants until he picked her up.

“Everybody here?”

“Moira and Ruaidhrí are at home.”

Okay. That was fine. Really fucking okay.

He nearly broke his neck when he rounded the counter, the twins sitting cross legged behind it. They were just sort of staring at each other in silence, before glancing up at him in unison. Was it fucked up to be creeped out by your own kids?

“You two are killin me. Move.” Siobhán still balanced on his hip, he stepped into the back room.

Sinead was rubbing down a dead gull with borax, cornstarch and salt, her hair pinned in a pile on top of her head. It looked a little like it could be that bird's nest.

She was wearing her typical weird, flowy fair: loose green skirt, green wrapped top, yellow scarf tied around the base of her hair. She said folks dressed like that back home, not that he'd know either way. He'd never left the shit crater that was the Commonwealth.

Her belly, massive at eight and a half months gone, pressed against her shirt. How the fuck she managed to walk around getting shit done like she did with a baby in her, he'd never get. It was as much a mystery as her desire for _one more, oh, just one more, please._

“Moira ain't at home. Ruaidhrí saw her go towards the Safari Zone. He ain't seen her since.”

Sinead froze, looking up at him and peeling off her gloves. “She go with someone? That Dove girl?”

“He said she went alone, because nobody fucking listens.”

“Okay.” She waddled over to the sink, hurriedly scrubbing her hands, before turning back to him, hands on her hips. “You can just go find her.”

“Yeah,” he said, throat dry. “She's fine, right?”

Sinead reached out to take Siobhán. “Of course she's fine.”

* * *

Her blood was first. It sucked itself out of the ground and flowed back into her as if it were alive, before her skin cleanly pursed itself shut.

Her heart fused back with its aorta and her guts, bruised and bleeding from the fall, rearranged and tended to themselves. Bones cracked and shifted under her skin until they settled back where they belonged, breaks big and small healed. Finally her brain, a swollen, bloody mash, shrank and mended. Then her heart beat and her neurons fired off and, after a minute, she jerked unnaturally on the ground, before gasping and sucking in lungfuls of air. She sat up, looking around, a little achy, and blinked slowly. Her head felt heavy and foggy.

Thunder clapped overhead and rain started to fall in earnest. She remembered only the horrible feeling of falling and a crack, and all she wanted to do was eat something and fall asleep, but her body felt too sluggish to stand. It sounded like someone was calling her name, but she laid back down, anyway.

“_Moira!_”

She cracked her eyes open just a little, turning her head towards the park. A huge, lumbering shape like a yao guai was sprinting up the muddy hill, carrying a flashlight.

“_Moira!_”

Daddy. He couldn't see her. It took three tries before she was able to croak out his name for him to hear. “Daddy!”

He spun around and bolted in her direction, “_Moira?_”

“Daddy!”

He trained the flashlight on her as she shakily sat up up and started to sob.

“What the fuck are you doing here?!”

“I fell.”

“From what?”

“The tree.”

“What the fuck were you doing in a tree?”

“I dunno.”

He squatted down. “For fuck's- what hurts?”

“Head.”

“That's all?”

“Uh-huh.”

He messily scooped her up and rose quickly. “You know how fucking worried I was, huh? You wanna give your ma a heart attack? I been lookin' for you for over an hour. I'm thinkin', what, someone nab you? You leave the park?”

“I'm here,” she said lethargically. “Mom's mad.”

“Yeah, Ma's fuckin mad.”

“I'm here,” she repeated and it felt like something was moving inside her head.


	3. Elise

_"I will just take what I've got_  
_ Don't give me what you want_  
_ Mother, I love you so_  
_ I love you so_  
_ I've got parts of your father, and Dorrigo_  
_ Now I know that if I had a brother_  
_ He would know_  
_ He would know_  
_ But all I've got's a sister_  
_ She lives below._"

Megan Washington, "1997"

* * *

**October 18th, 2310 AD.**

When it had gotten dark, they'd ducked into an abandoned warehouse to escape the chill and swelling rain clouds. The back half of the building had long caved in on itself and what remained were two floors of echoing concrete and high ceilings. She'd assumed most of the machinery was long buried under the rubble in the back. Only one room housed anything of note-some kind of massive, mechanical loom that a conveyor belt ran under, caked in rust and dust.

“I think this was for processing fibers,” she had said, shining her flashlight on it.

“Like cereal?” Moira had asked from behind her.

“What?”

“Fiber.”

“No, fiber like fabric, genius.”

“Oh.”

“Not everything is about food, dumbass,” Ahmya had said flatly from the other room.

“Don't call me a dumbass.”

“Then don't be one. Everybody, come on.”

Elise had stepped out of the room and fallen into step beside Alex. They had followed the others as they made their way up the narrow staircase, ducking under cobwebs and emerging into what appeared to be an office. Several flipped desks and overturned chairs were scattered around the room. Papers, ink so faded they were illegible, lay in damp, moldering piles. Elise glanced upwards-the ceiling was perforated.

“We're going to get wet,” she had muttered to Alex, who had bent over to examine an empty water cooler.

“Oh, no, can't have that,” Moira had mocked. “Pwincess can't ruin her hair.”

“Fuck off-”

“This ain't the only room,” Ahmya had interrupted. “Moira, just because you can't get fucking hypothermia doesn't mean the rest of us won't.”

Elise had trailed her flashlight's light over Ahmya's back. A shotgun was slung over it and her armor had shined. For a split second, she had wondered what she looked like underneath.

Alex had tapped her shoulder and she had swung her light over to him, making him squint.

_ "_You okay?" he had signed, brow furrowing.

“I'm fine. You don't have to keep asking.”

_ "_Just checking."

“I know. Are you okay?”

He had given her a thumbs up before adjusting the strap of his rifle. When they were children, her mother had always said that her cousin was akin to a porcelain doll with his ceramic white skin and delicate features. He had always been, for lack of a better word, pretty. Elise had sometimes thought there was another side to her mother's comment, though, a reason why she had never said it when he or his parents were in earshot: Alex had spent the better part of their youth made fragile by illness.

"No one will ever follow me," he had always signed.

“They might.”

"No one wants a boss who's always sick and can't fucking talk."

The group had finally settled in a second office with a less dire ceiling and laid out their bed rolls against the walls. Besides her and Alex, no one seemed keen to so much as share three feet of floor space. Moira had taken point against the wall opposite to them, shucking off her filthy, brown boots and shaking out her messy braids. Elise wrinkled her nose-the girl's hair was a red rat's nest of neglected curls and frizz, though she supposed she shouldn't have been surprised: even with Alpha pedigree, a Pack mutt was still a mutt.

Rukmani had slunk to the corner diagonal from them in that unsettling, smooth way she always moved, fluid and careful, like a dancer. She had propped herself up in the corner, prosthetic legs stretched out in front of her, and seemed angled to watch them from behind her mask. Or, who fucking knew, maybe that was just how Disciples slept. Upright, like vampires.

“You want to stop staring at us?” Elise had snapped, unfolding her blanket as Alex lit his lantern's fatty candle.

No response.

“Rukmani?”

Nothing.

“Are you asleep?”

“Maybe she's dead,” Moira had chimed in hopefully, laying on her stomach as she wiped paint off her face with a cloth.

“No,” came their answer, cold and monotone.

“You're not dead or you're not asleep?”

“Neither, but you're an idiot.”

“Okay, but you _are _watching us,” Elise had cut in.

Rukmani's lip quirked down in disgust. “The only one who spends any time admiring your looks is you.”

Ahmya yanked on the edge of a desk, dragging it loudly across the floor towards the door. “Moira, stand this up against the door.”

“What if someone has to leave?”

“Like... right now?”

“No, I mean, sometimes I wake up to piss.”

“Gross.”

“Oh, sorry, I forgot Operators don't do that.”

“Moira, you can move the desk if you have to,” Ahmya had said, squeezing the bridge of her nose between her fingers.

“No one else will be able to, and it'll be loud when I do and then everyone will wake up and know I'm peeing-”

“We'll only know because you just told us.”

“What else would I be doing?”

“Leaving and never coming back?” Rukmani had offered.

“How about we just take turns keeping watch?” Elise had asked. “The door stays unblocked and we stay safe.”

“Fine.” Ahmya had put her hands on her hips, looking around. “Who goes first?”

“I'll go. I'm not going to sleep, anyway.”

* * *

She sits on the window ledge, leaning against the cold pane and staring out into the night. She's exhausted, but in that way that's so bone deep and complete it makes you too tired to even sleep. And she knows, if she were to lay down, she'd be made restless by the thought of them. She'd close her eyes and her father would be there, looking disappointed, and her mother would probably be crying, or making that pained, pinched face she does when she's trying not to.

She remembers how, when she was twelve, she had sneaked out of Nuka World with a group of kids on a sweltering summer day and followed a winding path to a long flooded quarry beyond the territory. They had stripped to their underwear and taken turns leaping off of a ledge into the water below. One of them, a Pack boy, had whooped and plunged, only to strike a rock on his way down. His femur had snapped like a twig and he had splashed out of the water, screaming, the white of his bone flashing as it jutted through his skin. His blood had flooded free and someone had had to run back home to retrieve his father.

Elise and Alex had crept home after, wet and shivering, and found their parents waiting in the Parlor's main room. Her father had looked like he'd swallowed something sour and her mother's usually serene, pretty face had been pulled so tight it looked like it might crack. Her aunt had simply seized Alex by the arm and dragged him into her room for a talking-to that had reduced him to sniveling tears.

“I'm sorry-” Elise had started and her father had help up his hand to silence her.

They had all just stood like that, silent, for several agonizing seconds, before he had finally spoken. “You don't go past territory lines.”

“I know-”

“Clearly, you don't, since you did just that.”

Her mother had just stood there, staring.

“You don't lie, not to us, and you don't sneak around.”

“No one died,” she had tried to argue weakly.

“They could have,” her mother had finally snapped. “Or _you _could have gotten hurt.”

“I just wanted to have fun...”

“You live in a theme park!”

“You don't let me go on most of the rides!”

“They're death traps!” her mother had nearly shouted, shaking slightly. “You act like we're tyrants for wanting to keep you alive!”

“Maybe you shouldn't have had me here then!”

Her mother had frozen, lips parted and eyes widening, before she had turned abruptly on her heel and vanished into the kitchens.

“That was low,” her father had said, folding his arms.

“It's true.”

“This place is safer than any dirt patch out there in that godforsaken wasteland.”

“Safer than Diamond City?”

His jaw had clenched, teeth gritting. “Watch yourself.”

“Everyone else gets to do what they want.”

“That's not even true.”

“Kathleen says Mom doesn't let me do anything because you don't have a spare.”

“A... what?”

“An heir and spare. That's what people do, she said.”

It had happened then, that shift that always made her arm hair stand on end and turned even blood-forged veterans into twitching balls of nerves. His eyes grew glacial and his face rearranged itself into a blank mask that appeared, if anything, vaguely displeased. “Kathleen, as in Grace's kid?”

“Why?”

“Yes or no.”

She had shrunken back, looking down at her feet. “Yes.”

“If I ever hear you say something like that around your mother, you'll regret it more than you've ever regretted anything in your life. Are we clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Look at me and say you understand.”

She had pried her eyes up from the floor and shakily met his gaze. “I understand.”

“Go to your room. Just... go."

* * *

Elise pulls the blanket around her shoulders tighter and squints to see if it's raining. She doesn't hear anything. Back home, she always knew if it was. She'd fall asleep to sound of drumming on the Parlor roof.

She looks down at Ahmya, curled up on her side with her back against the wall, her chest plate lying just within arm's reach. The lantern light plays off of her high cheek bones and makes her dark brown skin look warm and dewy. The ring pierced through the center of her full bottom lip glints and Elise wonders if it gets in the way of kissing.

“You're supposed to be watching what's outside,” comes low from beside her, velvety in the way that makes her skin crawl.

She jerks and turns to find Rukmani standing unnervingly close.

“What are you doing?” she hisses.

“It's my turn.”

“Don't fucking sneak up on me.”

As seemed typical of her, Rukmani gave no reply.

Elise rose, stepping widely around her, and tried not to shudder.

She laid down beside Alex and tried to think of fiber and concrete and anything, anything else that there was.


	4. Rukmani

"_I'm not here_  
_This isn't happening_  
_I'm not here_  
_I'm not here_  
_In a little while_  
_I'll be gone_  
_The moment's already passed_  
_Yeah, it's gone_  
_And I'm not here_  
_This isn't happening._"

\- Radiohead, "How to Disppear Completely"

* * *

**October 18th, 2310 AD.**

_ Beep beep beep._

When she sleeps, she hears it. It used to hurt, like the legs she doesn't have.

She used to wake up flinging herself out of bed and covering her head. Now it's just noise. _Beep beep beep_. 

On occasion, she'll feel an itch and she'll go to scratch her shin only to find nothing there. It's fine. You don't need legs to live. Her father told her that.

_ Beep beep beep_. Now it's just noise, like the itch is just a feeling. It doesn't have to mean anything more than what it was.

She thinks about it every night when she slides off her prostheses and how it was just something that happened and it's over now, so it's fine.

She thinks about it how she thinks about everything: in short, controlled, faraway pieces. If you think too much, too fast, you'll think everything at once and you'll feel things but have nowhere to put it all.

The funny thing about land mines is if they're buried right, you won't even realize you've stepped on one-you really won't feel it-until you've heard the beeping. Even then, you probably won't realize what it is if you weren't expecting it. A few seconds and you're out of time. _Beep beep beep_.

You sort of jackknife out of the way, but it's too late and your legs hurt so badly that they go back to not hurting at all. There's smoke everywhere and sand in your mouth. Somebody may be screaming.

And you wake up without your mask to your mother sitting next to a cot. You're lying on the cot. You don't remember getting there. Your mother's sitting so straight it looks like it hurts and she's not looking at you. When you make a noise, she just says (still not looking at you), "You lost both your legs."

You learn later that most mothers would be crying. They'd probably try to stop you from looking down and hug you. They'd break it to you gently.

"You stepped on a land mine by the scrapyard."

"Oh."

And you think you should be scared or sad, but she's not.

"Does it hurt?"

"No."

"Strong medication," she says.

"What will I do?"

"With what?"

"Without them?"

"We'll have something built."

And then it just sort of happens. You start to crack a little and tears start leaking out of your eyes even though you don't think you're crying. You're high on the pain meds but you don't know it because it's ten years ago and you're too young to understand.

Your mother looks at you and she says, "There's a saying: one day, this pain will be useful to you."

Then she stands up and leaves the clinic. That's when you actually want to cry.

After a few minutes, your father comes in and he sits next to you and holds your hand.

Years later, when you're angry with her, you might bring it all up because, maybe, it did hurt, even if you decide it didn't, and she will confess something in a way you have never heard her speak.

She will say-

* * *

_Beep beep beep_.

It's her watch going off. She had set an alarm.

Elise is sitting on the window ledge Staring at Ahmya, and Rukmani locks her prostheses in place and stands so quietly Elise doesn't even look her way.


	5. Sinead

**Warning: Graphic sexual content.**

* * *

_"She is handsome, she is pretty,_  
_ She is the belle of Belfast city,_  
_ She is a-courting one, two, three,_  
_ Pray, want you tell me who is she?"_

\- "I'll Tell Me Ma," Irish folk song

* * *

You do what you have to to survive. She had learned that early, barefoot and eating cakes made of weeds and scraps of tree bark. She had learned that when she woke up one morning to find her mother wouldn't. She had learned that when her grandfather had packed their bags and spent every last coin they had to buy them spots on a boat.

Even after her feet found land again, she was plagued with nightmares that would haunt her until her dying day. She dreamt of the endless rock and creaking of the boat and the tossing, angry waves and the creatures that broke the surface of the water.

The whale had been a wall of black, six eyes turning and blinking all over its head, and when it burst out of the water, the boat had almost capsized. The squids had been worse. Their tentacles seemed to go on for miles, thrashing about until they found something to grab. The third boat in their party had been snapped in half and dragged beneath the waves, and then they were two.

And once they had found their promised land, they had found that there was a monster for every new source of food, each more twisted than the last. And robots that could look like you and came in the night to replace you.

"I want to go home," she had sobbed and her grandfather had held her.

"This is your home now."

And she had cried harder.

But she was an O'Seanachain woman, so she had traded her tears for bootstraps and got on with the life she hadn't wanted. When no one would take them in, she had helped raised the walls of their own settlements. When no food could be scavenged, she had helped till the land and taken up hunting. First, she had caught hares and birds in makeshift traps like her mother used to make and sold spare game until she had saved up enough for a hunting rifle. Then the game got bigger-dogs, molerats, and radstags. Over time, her grandfather had come to teach her the old ways of preservation and they had all earned pretty caps selling the jerky and trophies she made. 

She had been eighteen-two years spent in this strange land-when she killed her first yao guai. She had stared down the barrel of her hunting partner Conor's sawed-off shotgun and, just as the beast swung open its jaws, she had had squeezed the trigger twice. Its head had exploded in a rain of blood and skull and brains. 

They would have eaten for days, had the raiders not come.

* * *

**March. 2286 AD.**

She and Conor had field dressed the yao guai, the whole animal too massive for the two of them to drag back alone, and wrapped its meat in parchment paper and stacked it in a wheelbarrow that they took turns pushing back home.

They were just about to emerge from the forest when she caught sight of them through the trees: a group of strange men in black grease paint and rusty cage armor. They were drunk, by the way they listed side to side and shouted, and some of them had started kicking over grain barrels. She went to stride out of the forest, but Conor grabbed her wrist and pulled her back.

"_Sinead_."

She had almost obliged, until her grandfather had strode towards them as the others cowered and a grizzled man put a gun to his temple.

"Oi!" she shouted, leaping out from behind the trees. "What the fuck d'ya letches want?"

They all turned towards her and the man, twitchy, likely from jet, said, "Well, who knew they were keeping you a secret, beautiful?"

"Take the gun off him."

He didn't oblige. "You off at another settlement?"

"No. I was hunting."

"Oh, yeah? Well, see, my men and I are real hungry-"

"We got a yao guai. You can have it," she said, trying to sound like her palms weren't sweating. "Just leave us be."

The grizzled man agreed and, for a time, the bastards were satisfied to swing by every week or so and collect a "tax" of food and caps. As the months dragged on, a little more was taken. Then a little more. Sinead accepted with bitterness that this was just to be the way of things and they'd have to tighten their belts to keep the peace. You do what you have to, she told herself, so you and yours can survive.

It was the foolish assumption of a child.

* * *

**August. 2287 AD.**

On her nineteenth birthday, she sat beside Conor on a hilltop and watched through tears as their settlement burned.

The raiders had come by several days into a Psycho bender with blood on their minds and guns in their hands. Her grandfather had refused the demanded patronage of every cap they owned and a bullet had been their reply. She _couldn__'t _think about about that now, the way blood had sprayed out the back of his head and he'd crumpled to the ground, or how the raiders opened fire when everyone had turned to flee.

She and Conor had escaped on the grace of God alone and they watched the woods for others to emerge, but no one ever came.

"We have to kill them," she gasped through tears. "We have to-"

"What good'll it do?" he demanded, not looking at her. "We'll just get ourselves fucking killed."

So, her people died and the raiders lived.

* * *

**April. 2289 AD.**

She'd only killed one man by the time she found Nuka World. He had been a roaming merchant. When she'd offered caps for any food he had, he'd set his hand on her knee and asked if she was alone. Conor had been three months dead by then, taken by a parasite he got from a sick hare, and she had held him as he sweated and shit himself to death. The man couldn't have known what he'd done, that his hand on her knee was as ugly a reminder of her loneliness as it was an insult to her. She had felt a spate of fear along with the disgust when she saw the look in his eyes, too-the only real question was of what he could get away with.

She'd shoved a Bowie knife into his throat in a panic and the blood had spilled warmly over her hand and wrist as he gurgled and wrenched away. He died faster because of that, she was sure, and when he had stopped twitching and pissing himself, she had stumbled away from the campfire and vomited into some bushes. But after, despite the guilt, she had looted his corpse and found a satchel of caps and enough canned goods to last her a week. 

You do what you have to, she had told herself.

She had heard talk of a city that was thriving near as much as Diamond City not long after. Commonwealthers called it Nuka World and said, while she and her people had been scrabbling about in the dirt near the coast, raiders had seized a theme park and turned it into a monstrosity. She'd missed the year of terror they rained down on the Commonwealth, too far away and wrapped up in her own griefs, but the Minuteman, she was told, had driven them from the land after they'd destroyed the Institute and turned the Brotherhood into rubble. They'd had numbers and unity on their side to drive the raiders out, but, even with newly seized Brotherhood tech, they had shied from pursuing them into their territory.

"Stay out of the Commonwealth and we'll leave you be," was the edict that had been declared.

"City's booming, the bastards," a farmer had spit when she'd stopped to trade near the mountains. "It's got every vice and sin a man could want, so no-good travelers flock from all over."

"Is it secure?"

"Course it's secure. Minutemen haven't tried to bring them to justice even once, have they?"

"What's the gang like there?"

"There's three." And he had told her gritty details, some true and some tall tales, and when her handful of caps had only bought her a jug of water and a heel of bread, she had made her decision.

* * *

A year of wandering and hard living had toughened her. No longer just soft curves, she had gained a layer of lithe muscle. Caked in grime and carrying a large, bloody sack, she had tried to look every bit the raider when she passed beneath Nuka World's arches. They could smell fear, she was told.

The guard standing in front of the amphitheater gate, though, seemed less concerned about her mettle than he did her tits.

"I wanna talk to your leader."

"Mason's Alpha," he said and she pushed down her disgust to push her chest forward and offer him the kind of smile she'd learned men so often liked.

"Can I see him?"

"Where you from?"

"The coast."

"Don't sound like any coaster I've heard."

"Somewhere farther before that." She smiled more and he returned it, letting his gaze stray to her hips and the way her skirt hung from them. "You know, Mason don't talk to everybody, but I uh, could probably get you in to see him."

She fluttered her lashes. "Oh, are you someone important?"

"Uh, well, you know, I've been here a few years."

The amphitheater smelled like blood and shit and fur. Pack members were milling around in their garish armor and face paint and several stopped to stare at her. She tugged down the collar of her wrapped top a few inches, tightened it to press her breasts up towards her throat. _You do what you have to do_, so she left her dignity somewhere between the cages and the bleachers.

The guard nodded and she rounded a caged-in fighting pit where two feral hounds were tearing chunks of flesh off of each other. She marched forward and, with hands she commanded to be steady, emptied a massive yao guai head from her sack at the foot of the throne of the biggest bastard she had ever seen. He was almost two-hundred centimeters tall, she reckoned, and solid muscle piled on top of solid muscle, with a shock of red hair and carefully groomed mustache. Smeared across his face was some kind of war paint-yellow, blue, red. His arms looked as thicker than her waist.

"What the fuck is this?" His voice had the nasal drag of a local accent.

"Lookin' to join."

"Yeah? Good for you. Fuck off."

"I'm the best hunter around," she lied.

"No offense, but I doubt it."

"I killed this myself."

"Great. Really, I'm happy for you, but we don't let in every chick with a carcass who comes through those gates."

She glanced around, sweat starting to gather on the nape of her neck as a crowd of onlookers started to form. "I see you like taxidermy."

"Taxi-what?"

"Taxidermy. Dead animals you've stuffed."

"And?"

"I can taxi- stuff better than anyone, anywhere. I swear it on me mother. I can make 'em look like they never died."

He frowned, shooting a glance towards a bulky man in a tiger mask. "We do just fine. Now-"

"Yours look like shite."

He stiffened and leaned forward. "Excuse me?"

"Your taxidermy is shite. That dog over there's torsos overstuffed and its face is all wrong-"

"You want a collar?"

"What?"

"You come in here bragging about shit that'd make you a useful slave, not a fucking Pack mate."

"You try to put a collar on me," she said. "And I'll bite your fingers off."

* * *

Looking back, she wonders if it was then that he decided to fuck her. She'd threatened him with her tits pressed forward and she thinks that, had she been someone else, he wouldn't have laughed so easily and told her, if she wanted to live, to beat a scrawny kid in an elephant mask in a fist fight.

God love and keep her grandfather, he had loved bare knuckle boxing something fierce and though she wasn't a brawler, he'd taught her how to throw a punch and fight dirty. The kid had glanced at Mason after raising his fists and she'd swung for his dick with all the hate and misery she'd been nursing for twenty years. He had screamed and collapsed and she had kicked him in the face until he spit up blood. 

It wasn't an impressive fight-she hadn't proven much of anything-but she had thought quick and had blood on her skirt. The others had had a good laugh at their Pack mate's expense and he'd called her a cheating cunt through a bloody nose and busted lip. She had just stood there, looking at Mason with his ridiculous face paint and animal skin pants. When she gave him a smile, it had been of the shit-eating sort.

"You ain't Pack," he finally said. "Not by a longshot."

"I can be. If you give me a chance-"

"One chance. Same as everybody. Then, when you fuck up, we'll feed you to the zoo."

The first night, they had given her food, laughing, in a dog food bowl and pointed her to a grubby mattress in the cage with the mutts. She had spit on their boots and refused it.

"Sleep on the floor and starve then, bitch."

She was a O'Seanachain and her grandfather had always said that meant something. 

"Oh, we ruled once," he had told her. "Long ago. Invaders, the English, the bombs, all of 'em tried to stomp us out and all of 'em are gone, but us? My girl, we're still here."

So she had slept on the floor outside the cage, because O'Seanachains didn't sleep with the fleas.

* * *

She had been there a week before he fucked her.

One night, she plopped down at a campfire for new recruits, all of them grumbling about the pranks they'd been subjected to, and grabbed a half-full bottle of whiskey from the grip of a tipsy kid. She took a deep breath and chugged almost the whole of it. Truth be told, she had always hated the taste and burn of alcohol despite how often she'd made herself drink back home, but she'd watched these fools for long enough to know they'd admire a girl who could hold her liquor.

The kid swore at her, but the others laughed and raised bottles and cups. When the fire had sunken down into its embers, she had drunkenly risen and convinced a Pack girl named Rudder to let her teach her how to dance a reel.

Mason had sat down at a nearby fire among more grizzled men. And the clumsy reel dissolved quickly into her swinging her hips and twirling her skirt as Rudder giggled and struggled to stand. 

He looked and she looked back.

* * *

One by one, the other raiders had begun to peel away from the fires. Some walked off in search of a hit of harder stuff and others vanished in pairs to rut like dogs in whatever cranny they could find. A few suckups had stayed at Mason's fire, vying for his attention, and eventually he stood up without saying anything to them, took a final swig of rotgut, and walked slowly towards her.

She leaned forward and stared without a smile and he walked right past her. She didn't move for nigh on a minute, before she rose-the whiskey had put a quiver in her legs-and approached the alley he'd walked down. Two Pack members, likely having been pawing at each other in the shadows, scurried out of the alley as she entered. He was leaning against the wall, arms folded, and she stepped toe to toe with him.

On a good day, she was about a hundred and fifty-seven centimeters tall, and he dwarfed her by several heads. _Don't let him make you small_. She looked up at him and leaned against the wall opposite him. He stepped forward without a word and took firm hold of her hip, and the pair of them reeked of alcohol, but her mind had never felt so clear: she was no fighter; this was her in. 

"You gonna pick me up?"

He grunted and roughly grabbed her, hoisting her up and pressing her against the wall. For a minute, he just stared at her, as if he was measuring the threat of some wild animal, before latching onto her throat and biting hard. She yelped and pulled back slightly, and that had been what he sought, with the sloppy way he bit down her neck to the tops of her breasts, where he buried his face.

Her crotch ground against his hard stomach and she wrapped one arm around his neck, the other yanking at the side of her top until it pulled free. He groaned, biting her clavicle and squeezing her waist before taking a nipple in his mouth and sucking feverishly. Then the other, his grip bruising her. She gasped and he sucked harder, one hand sliding to wring her thigh.

When he spoke, his breath was hot on her sticky skin: "Anyone every tell you your tits could suffocate someone?"

She surprised herself by laughing loudly.

He looked up at her. "You laughing at me?"

"Aye, I'm laughing at you."

The hand on her hip forced itself between the wall and her thick ass, kneading. "You don't get to do that."

"I just did," she pressed, grinning, and he grinned back. "Am I in trouble?"

"First rule of the pack, you respect the Alpha."

"Am I a Pack mate now?"

"Fuck no, but you're about to get fucked like one."

He swung her around as she laughed harder and dropped her in the dirt with a clumsy dip. She tilted her hips up towards him, tipped her head back and stretched her arms over her head. She thought of Conor.

He crawled over her, yanking her top back over her breasts, then up over her head.

"Don't you even wanna know me name?" she mocked as he all but tore off her skirt.

"I know your fucking name."

"Who told you?"

He didn't answer, running his hands up her bare thighs and hooking his fingers into her underwear. They weren't as lucky as her skirt-he tore them clean in two.

"Oi!"

"You'll find new ones," he snorted, hands spreading her legs as he stared down as if transfixed, as if he'd never seen a cunt before.

"Were you askin' after me? That how you learned me name?" she teased and, with a movement surprisingly fluid for someone so massive, he slid down her body and buried his mouth between her legs. She shouted in surprise. Without warning, he was all tongue and lips and a little teeth and she felt winded.

He ate her like he was a man starved, hand reaching up to press hard against her stomach and pin her to the ground as she bucked. The climb made her dizzy, like she was staring down from an impossible height, and the peak that followed was a sledgehammer. She forgot herself and moaned loudly, writhing in the dirt. 

Someone nearby broke out into peels of laughter and she clamped shut her mouth, trying to suppress any noise but he wouldn't _stop._

And then, suddenly, he did. It was abrupt how he broke away and climbed over her. His mouth was glistening and his eyes looked hazy.

"Don't be shy," he murmured and so she wasn't. She grabbed his sweaty shirt and yanked on it until he sat up and peeled it off. His biceps and pecs were veined and bulging and his stomach was less like a plain than a mountain range. Damp and aching, she reached up to run her hands up his abdomen, then down to the hard V of his hips.

He sat back on his heels and snapped off his belt, before standing to wrench off his pants and scrappy boxers without ceremony. He was, to put it politely, if she even had the right, in proportion, for whatever that was worth. He got back down on all fours, looming over her, and after another bite of her throat, he angled his hips and slammed inside. It was a shock of pain, brutish and beastial, that yielded into something that made her stomach knot and her lungs burn. He fell into a hard rhythm, each thrust a shock through her bones, and now when she moaned, she let loose as he had wanted.

When she caught up to his pace, it became a rough kind of fucking she had never known and never wanted to _not_ know again. Settlements boys had trembling hands and nervous thrusts, whereas Mason was all coiled muscles and savage grunts and snapping hips. A hair more out of control and it would have been a nightmare, but he knew how to ride the line. It was only a little too much and the ache was sweet and, when he propped himself up to slide his other arm between them and grind his thumb against her clit, she flew apart.

It would be different in a few years, when they'd grown past the passive dance and mean alleyway fucks and she only sometimes thought of Conor.

Two years from that point, he would be panting her name-_Sinead Sinead Sinead_-and fucking her on a mattress, hard but not as hard, with more care and control, as if he was scared he'd break her. He would kiss her hard and his hands would cup her breasts and her hips and her belly like he was in a frenzy and couldn't get enough of the feel of her skin.

"_Sinead_," and the way he would say it would it would scare her a little, because there'd be something else behind it waiting to come out.

And as Pack mates started turning to her almost as much as they turned to him and the shop she started soared, she would suddenly be met with a rush of fear, because for the first time in her life, everything felt permanent and her fingers weren't even worked to the bone.

* * *

**July. 2302 AD.**

She cried herself blotchy and hoarse after he brought Moira home, the tiny girl looking all the tinier in his arms. Her daughter's eyes were bleary and she was slow to answer her questions, swooning slightly until Mason set her down in her bed.

"Concussion," he said. "Doc said."

She nodded tightly, bidding herself not to cry as what had happened was explained to her.

Later, she hugged Moira until the girl squirmed, then told her she loved her so many times her mouth went dry, before Ruaidhrí rolled over and begged her to turn the light back out. Then, shoulders straight, she had stepped into the bathroom and sobbed into her hands, trying and failing to swallow her cries.

There came a knock at the door and she scrubbed away her tears, taking in a deep breath, before she opened it.

"Hey," he said, leaning against the frame with a muddled look.

"Hey."

"Told you, she's okay."

Sinead took another deep breath, running a hand over belly as the baby inside shifted furtively. A girl, this one, too. "I know."

He cupped her face in a massive, calloused hand and bent down to nuzzle her cheek, dog-like.

"It just- it could have been worse and, fuck me, I'm gonna fucking cry again." She stepped back, waving a hand beside her face as if that would quell the fresh batch of tears. "Oi, I'm made of tougher shite than this."

Mason frowned and glanced down at her belly as it rippled with movement, resting a hand over what seemed to be the kid’s kicking feet. He stroked his thumb back and forth in a weak attempt to calm her.

"Think you're pretty fucking tough."

She placed her hand on top of his, eyes hooded. "I'm cryin' like a babe."

"Oh, shut up, last time you cried was what? Eight fuckin' years ago? How many pups you carried around since then?"

"Six years ago." The laugh she gave wobbled in her throat. "I cried until I boked when I found out your mangy ass had put two in there."

He gave her a shit eating grin. "Right. Still impressed myself with that one."

"You're a dog."

"You already know that," he purred, pulling her to his chest and bending to slide his free hand down to her ass. "Now, what say you if I uh, take your mind offa things?"

"You're seriously tryin' to shag me right now?"

"I'm always tryin' to do that."

"I'm gonna have to get you fixed."

At that, he bent down and carefully scooped her up into his arms, hoisting her bridal style. "Ain't my fault you're walkin' around here lookin' this good. Tits like that? What's a man supposed to do?"

"They're not for you, you fucking eegit," she laughed as he kissed her neck.

"See? I already made you feel better."

"Don't give yourself so much credit."

When he kissed her, it was softer than before.


	6. William

**Trigger Warning: Discussion of miscarriage, but no depiction.**

* * *

_"Holes riddled in your head, little bit of lead,_  
_Shake it out and line silhouette._  
_Miss me when you, you wish weren't kind of glad,_  
_Shake me all out when you're done, for you, for you,_  
_Shake it all out when I'm gone, I, for you._  
_Is the devil so bad if he cries in his sleep, while the earth turns?  
__And his kids learned to say, fuck you, they don't love you?"_

\- Rainbow Kitten Surprise, "Devil Like Me"

**October 14th, 2310 AD.**

He and regret have never been on a first name basis. He's always done what was necessary (perhaps a bit more, but never any less). A contract finished with a bullet planted between the eyes, a rival gang razed out of the equation or a boom of caps brought about by raiding some poor bastard's home—it's all just business. Their ledgers were balanced with blood and ash and for fifty odd years it had suited him more than fine. There was no need to get personal about it. Keep your hands dirty, but your mind clean. That's the secret, he thinks, to a long life.

And, well, if you _are _enough of a fool to accidentally slip up and sow a regret or two, that's your fucking problem. Atone or forget as the situation demands. Miss a target? Hunt them down like the devil. Say something you shouldn't have? Let it go. It had been uncomplicated, it had been _efficient _and now he's sitting at the Parlor's long table in front of a problem that was neither and wondering how the fuck he had helped bring an outlier into the equation.

Lizzie. That was his answer. Always was. How someone so calculating and practical had managed to throw so many wrenches in the works was fucking beyond him and when he looks at her now, sitting beside him, color drained from her face and eyes hazy, he realizes that a part of him hates her almost as much as he loves her.

This was her fault. They were all staring down a problem with no easy fix and he was wrestling with a one-two punch of regret all because, almost twenty years ago, Lizzie Wyath had gotten it in her head that she should try an experiment of another kind.

"Wouldn’t it be _interesting?_" she had asked him in her lab, as prim and poised and pretty as she ever was.

"Not particularly," he had replied, bored.

She had sighed dramatically, rolling her eyes towards the ceiling. "You're only saying that because you lack imagination."

He'd folded his arms. "Rather be unimaginative than inconvenienced. Or dead."

"Is that how you'd see it?"

"Yes." His voice had been firm in that way that said a conversation was over, but she hadn't seemed to notice.

"It just seems like everyone else is-"

"That's a piss poor reason to go about anything. I'm not chasing anyone off any cliffs."

"You never let me have any fun."

"This isn't about _fun_, Lizzie."

"Fine," she had said shortly. "I'll just do it myself."

"Yeah, good luck with that."

She had always made an idiot out of him.

He had found her not long after at the Devil's Taproom, the bar the Operator's had built up in the Galactic Zone, smiling and flapping her eyelashes at some scrawny new recruit. David, he had thought his name was, not that it had mattered: in an act that he would later find embarrassing simply because of how crass and out-of-control it made him look, William had broken the moron's nose and wiped his split fist on a neatly folded napkin. Lizzie had pursed her lips, stood and left without a word.

A week later, he had fucked her against the wall next to all her beakers, flasks and noxious chemicals and made the first in a series of stupid fucking mistakes.

* * *

"They can't have gotten far," Mags says.

Now it's back to the present and he thinks he prefers being bitter about the past to _this_.

"Maybe," he offers, carding his hands on the table. "We let them go."

"_What?_" Lizzie all but gasps.

"They're not kids. If they want to go so bad, I say let them."

"She's seventeen!"

"You were fifteen when Diamond City spat us out."

Lizzie stiffens, her eyes hardening. "I didn't have a choice."

"Yeah, so this is even better for them then, isn't it? If they want to be stupid and ungrateful, they deserve whatever they get."

"You don't mean that," she says and any hardness is gone. Now she just looks pathetic again. He shrugs, but he's pretty sure he does.

Mags is standing at the end of the table, leaning over a neatly kept map, several pins jabbed into it. The look she gives him is only vaguely tinged with annoyance, but certainly not anger. Deep down she agrees with him, he suspects.

"Let's discuss, then, what they don't deserve," she says coolly, "Such as every gun, chem and ration they saw fit to take with them."

"Your son vanished in the night and you're worried about the _deficit?_" Lizzie spits, suddenly all sharp edges again. "What shall we do, hunt them down just so we can rob them?"

"If they want to steal from us and strike out on their own, they should be prepared for the consequences."

"We had a lot less than that when we left home," he chimes in.

"Elise isn't like us! You know that! She's _sensitive_."

Mags rolls her eyes, as if this entire matter is too boring to be allowed. "It isn't my concern that you chose to spoil and coddle her so much she can't even be self sufficient."

"I did _not._"

_You did_ he wants to say, but doesn't. It isn't worth it. If he's had to learn anything when it comes to Lizzie, it's to pick his battles.

"No? Then you should be confident that she'll get wherever she thinks she's going and thrive."

Lizzie stands, her chair scraping loudly across the floor. "I'm not letting her run off to get herself killed just because I'm too proud to admit she still needs me."

Mags straightens. "Careful."

"Or what?"

William puts a hand on her wrist and she rips it away from him. "Lizzie-"

"Fuck you. And good luck convincing the others that we should find them just to recoup our losses."

* * *

Things had not only been stable when Lizzie had decided to ruin their lives, they had been profitable. Nuka World, hoisted up on the shoulders of the new Overboss, less than a year after Colter had been fed to the worms, had surged into a force to be reckoned with. The parks had been secured and divvied up after many threats and long-winded arguments and, though the Operators had only been granted the Galactic Zone in the end, Overboss Aiko had managed to pacify them. It was, after all, the largest park; easily defensible and fully stocked with dozens of deprogrammed robots.

Mags had been careful, as always, with a keen eye trained on profit. Gifted extra resources in exchange for a singular park, they had taken to converting the park's frivolous spaces into more industrious ventures: a casino, a bar, an inn, a restaurant, a weapons shop and a theater. Travelers of all stripes had poured in through their gates to have their caps filched like fools and the Operators' reputation as _the_ guns-to-hire had caught and spread like a sickness.

Even when the Institute fell and the Brotherhood followed, even after the Minutemen swelled their numbers and turned the Commonwealth into a risk not worth taking, it hadn't mattered. Between the park and prospects in the West, they were making caps hand over fist and then-

And then Lizzie had gotten bored. She could never just sit still and, with less raids, she had less experiments to run and numbers to crunch and problems to unwind.

He had tried more and more to talk sense into her, even after seemingly giving in, but every single one of his arguments had fallen on deaf fucking ears, blocked out by her self assurance that she was so intelligent, _so _competent and in control, that there could only be a singular, perfect outcome at the end of this debacle. Maybe he had bent not only out of love and exhaustion; maybe he had also secretly wanted to prove her wrong, to let her taste the bitter bite of hubris in one form or another, until she gave up.

He had conveniently forgotten that Lizzie Wyath was not a woman who comprehended failure as anything but a temporary state.

At first, when nothing took, she had begun synthesizing and injecting hormones. Then when something _did _take but quickly lost its grip, she had expressed mild annoyance and started poring over old anatomy texts and drawing up all sorts of charts and graphs. What it was all for, he couldn't be made to care. The entire situation was one he kept out of mind as frequently as possible--this was her bizarre pet project and, really, it had barely anything to do with him at all. It had been easy to be uninvolved, especially with how she spoke of her endeavors in only cold, scientific terms.

One night, as they were eating dinner in the now barely inhabited Parlor, she had simply stated, "A spontaneous abortion, I'm afraid."

He'd blinked, squinting. "What?"

"It seems one took but failed."

"Oh."

"It's actually very statistically normal," she had started rattling off facts then, folding and unfolding her hands. "As many as fifty to seventy-five percent of attempts end in miscarriage before you're even aware you're pregnant, did you know that?" She had spoken of it as if she was discussing something as benign the weather.

"No." He had shifted uncomfortably. "You okay?"

"Of course. Like I said, it's statistically normal."

Then two_. _Three. Four. _Are you okay? Yes, of course_. _Statistically-_ But he knew her. When she had grown increasingly restless and worked harder just to occupy her time with even the most minute of tasks, he had seen it. And when he had caught her lying awake, staring at the ceiling with glazed eyes, it had, he was reluctant to admit, scared him.

If the fifth one had gone the same way, he would have put his foot down, but, no, that one had ended so much worse, so one more time, sure, of course, if it would hold her together-

* * *

Now it's just him and Mags at opposite ends of the table, staring at each other, then the map, in an embittered silence. If he had more energy and hadn't woken up to chaos and empty beds at the crack of dawn, he'd have bitten back at Lizzie as she stormed out.

_ No,_ he wants to say. _Fuck you, actually. Fuck you for giving me someone to regret._


	7. Savoy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All my thanks go to the ever perfect Clarissa for spitballing ideas with me and listening to my one million and one head canons <3.

"_All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped_." - Mitch Albom

* * *

**October 14th, 2310 AD.**

They're gone.

No one answers when he knocks on Ahaana's shack door, which stands only a few feet shy of his own (how did he not hear her leaving in the night? how did he let himself sleep so deep?) and he opens it to a vacant room. Her empty steam trunk hangs open like a dead man's mouth. The shelf above her bed lays bare. Her art supplies have been spirited away.

He touches the sheets of her twin bed, knotted up from past nights of fitful sleep, and finds them cold. Perched on her pillow is a tiny origami bird made from white scratch paper, and there is a note to be found in its guts once unfolded: “I love you. I'm sorry. Goodbye.”

He's the slow, methodical sort. Fast on the draw when the situation demands it—even shockingly so, what with his massive, lumbering frame—but otherwise, he likes to take his time. Stakeouts, torture, a good fuck. Those kind of things deserve careful consideration and steady appreciation. He'd rather plan things out slow to dodge a fuck-up, then savor the fruits once they're good and fallen.

In any other event, this would be a time of careful dissection. Assess the problem, pull it apart sinew by sinew, until you've got it all figured out. Then you plot. Instead, he just sits on Ahaana's bed and stares at the wall thinking not much at all. A portrait of a cat is tacked to it, drawn in charcoal on yellowed sketch paper by Rukmani some years ago. The cat's eyes are narrowed and, though sitting straight, he can feel the tautness of muscles ready to coil and spring. Everything Rukmani draws is cold but alive.

_ Gone_. The word echoes dully in his head like a stone pitched down a dry well.

_ Gone_. Echoes like Ahaana's heartbeat, like Rukmani's. Before each was born, he would put his ear to their mother's stomach and listen as their hearts pulsed through the murk. _Thud, thud, thud_. His cheek tingles from the memory: warmth of her skin as he laid against her, the solid kicks of his daughters as they moved inside.

_ Gone_.

He rises slowly to his feet and walks out of the room, down the steel ramps of the Mountain, and outside into the cold, dim morning. The sky is gray with waiting autumn rain. He stops at the girl on guard; some wiry new recruit with a blank, black mask, who he would lay money won't make it a year. She shrinks back slightly when he turns to her.

“How long you been on duty?”

“Since five.”

_Only three hours_. “Rukmani come out at any point?”

“No.”

“Ahaana?”

“No. Why?”

He just grunts, stalking past her and down the path that leads to the courtyard surrounding the swan pond. Ten years since he last clenched a cigarette between his teeth, but his hand still instinctively flits to his pocket to pull out a carton that isn't there for some nicotine comfort. His chest feels hollow. He needs to fill it with smoke.

An Operator woman comes bolting through the archway that leads to the other parks. Her face is twisted in a grimace and her rifle is bouncing on her back. He watches her race into Nuka Town through his mask's jagged eye holes with little interest, leaning against the low brick wall, and it occurs to him that Nisha is still asleep. He should go wake up her up. He should tell her. He should do a thousand different things and instead he just stands there and watches leaves shiver across the pavement.

His brain twitches like it's trying to form a thought but can't, like it's slowly being starved of oxygen. Is he breathing? He checks. Yes. He's breathing.

A woman's shrill cry rings out from Nuka Town.

_ Gone gone gone gone gone gone_

He turns towards the bushes and vomits.


	8. Ahmya

_“Running away was easy; not knowing what to do next was the hard part.”_

\- Glenda Millard, _A Small Free Kiss in the Dark_

* * *

**October 19th, 2310 AD.**

It's early and storming when Ahmya wakes. The others are still asleep, save for Alex, who's taken up sentry at the window. He's sitting sideways on the ledge, head resting on the pane and sniper rifle leaning against his left thigh. If she were the betting sort, she'd lay caps on his face being set in its typical somber, bored expression.

When she stands, stretching and cracking her spine, he turns his head towards her and gives an inquisitive thumbs-up. She nods, before pointing at her wrist-_time?_ A quick glance at his remarkably shiny-faced wristwatch (the best Operator caps can buy), then five fingers followed by ten. 5:10. Not too bad. If she's being honest, it should probably be get-going time, but like hell is she about to nudge fucking Moira or Rukmani with her boot toe and bid them "rise and shine." One's a pocket rocket and the other's a snake and she'd rather hold off handling either for as long as she can.

Let them sleep. It's still pitch black outside and rain's coming down hard. In fact, she reasons, waiting might even be good, unless the storm holds tight, and then they'll have just wasted time and will get wet anyway and-

God, _fuck_ her. And _fuck_ this. Weight like a planet's on her shoulders and only Alex seems the slightest bit pressed to share the load, and, even then, he's no shot caller. Giving out orders has never been her bag either, but if not her then who? And if not now, then when?

She walks over to Alex, looking out the window and seeing nothing beyond the dim slurry of rain. Even with light, there wouldn't be too much to see. They're on a pretty barren stretch of road, this broken down factory the only occupant for miles. Everything else is rubble. The Minutemen never saw fit to pretty up this patch of shit, she figures. Too close to the Mountains. It's a big ol' buffer zone full of nothing.

"See anything?" she asks under her breath and Alex shakes his head. In the poor lantern light, she notices he looks drained. "You good?"

He shrugs. There's not really much else to be said, him with no vocal cords and her knowing barely a lick of sign language, but she still stands there for a while longer. In a weird way, she almost likes Alex, at least in terms of present company. He's clever, calm and careful in the way that any Operator worth their salt is, but less prone to haughtiness and petulance than the rest. Even rolls up his sleeves when the need arises. And when the ever anal retentive Elise she gets herself all worked up over some nonsense, he always brings her back down to Earth.

Plus you ask him to do something for more than just his crew and he _might_ even consider it (probably wouldn't do it, but still).

"How far do we got to go before we find somewhere, you figure?"

He frowns and thinks it over, before holding up his hands and spreading them a great distance apart.

"Yeah, probably," she mutters. "I gotta piss."

She fumbles on her boots and armor in the dark. Her armor pieces are medium-weight, metal affairs that fit well over her long-sleeved black shirt and cargo pants. Good enough to stop bullets. The chest piece is even lined with some rubber and a thin mix of lead, carbon and boron that sets her somewhat at ease, not that she plans on wading through the Glowing Sea any time soon.

It was a gift. Her mother made it for her. 

But she's not going to think about that.

She shoots a few glances around the room: Elise is curled up under a disheveled blanket. Moira is sprawled on her stomach and murmuring in her sleep. Rukmani is-

Rukmani is gone. 

"Alex?" she hisses. "Rukmani?"

He shrugs and points to the door.

Ahmya realizes the girl's shit's still here, so she didn't pick up sticks and run.

She slides out through the door and into the hallway that stretches out before of her like a bottomless, black gullet. The air is bitterly cold, even for a Commonwealth autumn night, and her eyes barely adjust to the dark. Suddenly it feels like she's not standing in a hall, but dangling over a pit, like there's only a tiny thread keeping her from plunging downward and it's... starting... to... fray-

She shakes herself out of it. She has to keep her head screwed on straight. Just need some light, is all.

It's about feelings, really, at least for her. Thinking and feeling just the right thing to get what you need. It's a bit like digging through your pockets for spare keys or your pack for extra bullets, only you're digging around in your brain and grabbing for emotions and memories. Give it a few seconds and your fingers will usually close around what you need. To get warm is a tiny thing - the first thing she ever did. She thinks _hot water gushing out of a tap and a steel tub filled all the way to the brim_ and the temperature under her skin notches up until she's hot to the touch. Even without it, she's always run warmer than most.

"You're like my little personal space heater," her mother used to say when Ahmya was little and would crawl into her lap. Her mother would kiss the top of her head and tell her how, right after she was born, her daddy had thought she had had a fever-

She doesn't want to think about this. Not now. Maybe not ever. She wants to fold her mother up like an old photograph and tuck her in the back of a drawer and forget about her. Her and her father and her brother and her sister. _There's no going back_. Whit, the Disciple boy with the featureless black mask and knack for knife-making had been the first to say it and it had become a mantra. Sometimes, she heard some of the kids back at camp whispering it to each other in the late night and early morning, those times when a person's the most stuck inside their own head and the memories get so strong all they wanna do is run back home.

She repeats it to herself now, then rummages around in her brain for an annoyance of some kind. She remembers how her sister, Hitomi, a few years back, seized the caps she had kept under her mattress and blew them on some shitty arcade game. It's been made duller by the years but thinking about it picks at a bigger scab: Hitomi got away with far more than Ahmya and her brother ever had, her and her sticky fingers. She concentrates on the annoyance and channels it like radio waves to her right hand. Heat pools under her skin, beginning just under the edges of her fingernails, then creeping up the humps of her knuckles and extending all the way to her wrists.

After a second, she exhales and a low flame whooshes into existence, engulfing the entirety of her hand. She extends it out in front of her and uses the light to navigate down the hall, rounding the corner to the office that they had passed through earlier. There's a rush of cold air and she realizes that rain is showering down through the holes in the ceiling and hollowly drumming on the office desks. It looks surreal, this indoor storm.

Standing just in the doorway, watching it, is Rukmani.

Ahmya sucks in the flames and stills, starting to take a step back, but Rukmani speaks. "Can't sleep?"

"Slept enough."

"Doubtful."

"Yeah, well..." She rubs the back of her neck. "Listen, since you're up, I- uh- figure we oughta get ready to get moving soon."

Rukmani doesn't turn around to look at her. "In the storm?"

"Figure we wait a little. If it doesn't clear up, we gotta get going anyway."

"Wandering in the dark," she says, her voice frigid.

"Not totally. All we gotta do is find a decent spot to move camp to, go back and get the others."

She doesn't reply, by Ahmya can feel disapproval wafting off of her. It doesn't take a genius to know which wheels are turning in the girl's skull: if they don't find a permanent place to bunker down (and, preferably, do more than just survive), she's not going to stick around. She fled Nuka World with six Disciples in tow, including her sister, and each one looks to her like she's some kind of second fucking coming. All she has to do is say the word and they'll cut ties and set themselves loose from the group to strike out on their own.

Deep in her gut, Ahmya knows that if that comes to pass, ties won't be the only things ripe for slitting.

* * *

Before the group had struck out from the slapdash camp they'd set up in a half-collapsed Red Rocket, leaving behind the younger Nuka runaways - most of them bitching about being left out of the "action" - Elise had pulled Ahmya aside.

The girl had bustled over to her, looking out-of-place among most of the others in her neatly-buttoned, grey blouse, pleated navy skirt and tights. Her black hair was pinned in an impeccably neat halo braid. The only thing that had said it had occurred to her that they were about to rough it was the fact she'd traded out her Mary Janes for hiking boots. Sniper rifle on her back and pistol on her hip or not, girl was dainty as they came and without an ounce of muscle or fat to her. How she even handled the kickback of a gun, Ahmya'd never know.

She had stopped in front of Ahmya, hands behind her back. "We need to talk."

"We gotta get going-"

"Of course," she had said brightly, "but first, we need to talk."

Ahmya had held back an eye roll. "What do you want, Elise?"

She had glanced about before tipping her head towards the edge of the camp, and Ahmya followed her.

"Alex and I have some... concerns."

"Get to the point."

"Very well: we're not comfortable with the Disciples being here."

"Whole point of leaving Nuka World was to get _every _metahuman out. Leaving Disciples behind for the Apostles to find would've kinda defeated the purpose."

"Of course. But we're no longer in Nuka World. It may be in everyone's best interest if we... reconsider the effectiveness of this alliance."

"If you're about to suggest we split up, you can save your breath. We ain't got the numbers."

"We don't _all _need to split up."

"So what? I should just tell the Disciples to take a hike? How do you figure that'll go?"

Elise's face, delicate as the rest of her, with pale brown skin and dark eyes so wide they looked cartoonish, had soured slightly. "If we leave here and don't find anything, Rukmani isn't the type to care about numbers. Mark my words, she'll order her coven to slit our throats and rob us the minute she finds a better option."

"As opposed to slitting our throats now when we tell her to get lost?"

Elise had crossed and uncrossed her arms, frowning deeper. "You can't trust them."

"Yeah? Sure they'd say the same about you. Only difference is there's seven of them and four of y'all."

"Noted." Her lips had pursed and she had swiveled on her heel, sauntering away as haughtily as she could.

* * *

Bratty as she was, Ahmya has the sinking feeling Elise was right.

They're all living on borrowed time in more ways than one.


	9. Alexander

"_My feelings are too loud for words and too shy for the world._"

\- Dejan Stojanović

* * *

**December. 2302 AD.**

Alexander Black was eleven-years-old the second time Moira O'Seanachain spit on him. She was sitting on one of the scaffolding walkways the guards used to survey the Nuka-Town market, her legs swinging over the side as she sucked on a lump of peppermint. It had been his birthday two days prior and he was wearing the expensive, gray scarf his mother had had made for him as a gift. It was, in his opinion, remarkably sleek and stylish, and being freshly knit, it lacked the wear and tear of much of the world's garments.

He had spoken to Moira a total of three times in his entire life up until that point—or, rather, Moira had said something to him three times.

The first time, he had been six-years-old and had wandered away from his father in the bustling market. She, a year or so younger, had sidled up to him and asked if he wanted to see how many rocks she could fit in her mouth at once. After some careful thought, he agreed that he very much would, but his father had near-materialized out of nowhere before she could impress him and yanked him away.

"You'll get fleas," his father had snapped.

The second time, he had been eight and walking with Elise along the swan pond, her mother at a careful distance, eyeing the Disciples that lurked nearby. Moira had been chasing a gull with scabs and a knobby right leg and shoved him out of the way.

"Get fucked!" she had instructed, her red hair a wild bramble that curled this way and that, and he had fallen on his ass.

The third time, he had been ten and he and two other Operator boys, Tristen and Bryce, had been playing cards on the steps of the Cola Cars arena. A gaggle of Pack kids were nearby, playing with a frisbee. It was less a game of catch and more a war of attrition, truthfully, with the children flinging the frisbees at each other with wild abandon. One boy had “caught” a frisbee with his face, his lip erupting into a starburst of blood, and he had promptly tackled his attacker into a heap of thrashing limbs. 

Moira had, at some point, yanked a red Nuka Cola frisbee out of the hands of a runtier girl and hurled it in an impressive arc at her little brother Ruaidhrí’s head. He had squawked and dropped to the ground and the frisbee had sailed into the bushes. On a lark, Alex had jumped up and fished it out.

"Hey! Give it back!" she had shrilled and he looked up to see her charging towards him, her cheeks flushed. Though small for her age, Moira had the rabid energy of a foaming, junkyard dog and the mean right hook of a child twice her size. Alex, by contrast, was knobby, anemic and anxious, and knew black eyes and nosebleeds coming when he saw them.

He had dropped the frisbee as Bryce jeered at him for being a pussy and Moira had skidded to a halt, snatching it off the ground and promptly hocking a loogie onto his favorite white, button-up shirt.

“Don’t touch my shit, cocksucker," she had spat and, at some point between his journey from the Cola Car's steps and the Parlor's front door, he had realized he was fairly certain he was in love with her.

* * *

At the time of the second spitting, Alex, who now spent a great deal of time indoors due to an ill-constitution and nervousness, had begun keeping a detailed journal that would have been of no interest to anyone who wasn’t a particularly lonely eleven-year-old boy.

It mostly recounted the doldrums of day to day life, including his tireless acquisition of stamps and tourist pamphlets. Much of his collection had been bought with spare change from a bric-a-brac caravanner who passed through Nuka World infrequently, but his most treasured stamps and pamphlets were the ones that always came by way of his father and uncle when they returned from jobs in more populated areas.

He had well over one hundred stamps, some from as far as even Manhattan (though it had been acquired in Far Harbor, he pretended his father had journeyed all the way to New York just for him), and pamphlets from everywhere from the Museum of Witchcraft in Salem to the Lincoln Memorial all the way down in the Capital Wasteland.

He kept his stamps in a hand-sewn photo album that his mother had purchased for him, tucked carefully in the yellowed, plastic pockets meant for pictures. His pamphlets were largely stored in a laminated, red folder with a picture of Cappy on the front, though his favorites had the honor of being lined up on his desk.

He often spent hours carefully admiring them, mindful to keep them as pristine and orderly as possible. The stamps were never touched again once they were placed inside the photo album and he wore rubber gloves to read his pamphlets. Human hands were oily, he had read, and could damage printed materials over time.

December 11th, 2302 

_ Father returned from an assignment in Philly. This is located in the Eastern Commonwealth. He says there are lots of cities there. _

_He brought me a stamp for something called the Liberty Bell. It is hand painted, which I think is very impressive since it’s so small._

_One day I will go to Philly._

December 12th, 2302 

_ Uncle William returned from the coast. He did not bring me anything. Disappointing. _

December 13th, 2302 

_ Today is my birthday. I am eleven._

_ Uncle William is a liar. He did bring me something but saved it for today. It’s a boat inside a bottle. I will find out how this was done. _

_ Mother and Father gave me a scarf, a sweater, map of central Boston and fifty caps. I will hang the map on my wall. _

_Elise gave me a card and it is hideous. I will also hang it on my wall._

December 14th, 2032 

_ Today Moira spit on my head in the market. She was sitting on the guard’s walkway. She said she thought she’d give me some free hair gel but she also smiled and her spit smelled like peppermint. I wonder what kind of stamps she likes. _

* * *

One day later, the spit thoroughly washed from his hair but thoughts of peppermint still hovering in his brain, Alex wrote on a scrap of paper, “What kind of stamps do you like?” and hovered for almost an hour at the stone fountain near the amphitheater. He sat on the edge and pretended to be reading a book called “Map Making for Beginners,” which had almost all of its pages, but in reality, he was mostly staring at a single page and trying not to vomit.

Moira came loping down the way, tartan school sack slung over her shoulder, with a small cavalcade of other Pack kids—mutts, as his mother called them. To his luck, she was at the tail end of the group, and he jumped off the fountain and, as confidently as he could manage despite his sweating palms, intercepted her and held out the paper scrap.

“What the fuck do you want?” she snapped, wrinkling her nose.

Alex shook the paper a little and she snatched it out of his hand.

“What kind of— the fuck’s a stamp?” She squinted at him like he’d asked her the dumbest question known to man.

Just like that, whatever quiet high he had been experiencing that had lifted him up and gotten him this far came crashing down, splintering into a million pieces. That was not what she was supposed to say. She supposed to say historical, or nature or maybe flags, and he, like an idiot, had written no follow up questions or statements.

Note cards. He should have brought note cards. And a pencil. Instead he just stood there staring widely at her, lips slightly parted, feeling dumber and muter than perhaps he ever had in his entire life. She started to speak again, but whatever it was she had to say was lost to him, as he turned around and tore down the closest alley he could find, tears threatening to pop out of his eyes. 

His heart was jackhammering against his sternum when he fell back against the wall and sank down, now properly crying and wishing desperately that he could sink the ground or simply be un-born. It wasn’t until his hands suddenly began to feel numb that he opened his eyes and saw his fingers had begun to unspool into tiny, black tendrils like smoke.


	10. Griffin

"_There is no ghost, save the one ghost that lives in the heart of a motherless boy, till his footprints disappear._"

\- Halldór Laxness, _Independent People_

* * *

**June. 2302 AD.**

Griffin was raised on a steady diet of late nights and classic vinyls. Records, stacked floor to ceiling, lined every wall of his father's maintenance-shed-turned-radio-station. Rock and punk and blues and jazz. Rebel music, his dad called it. Most of them saw so much rotation, on and off the air, that they barely even gathered a hint of dust.

Only one stack went untouched, cloaked in years worth of neglect. His dad said they were so shit there wasn't even a point in trying to sell them. Not even worth a cap, he said.

It wasn't until he was ten, when his dad ran out one afternoon to grab lunch, that Griffin had wiped off their fat layer of dust and glanced through them. There were eight of them, all old country and bluegrass records in cardboard album sleeves. A note wedged in the middle of them read:

"Radio Boy,  
  
Life's not all rock 'n roll and jazz.  
  
Love,  
Loony"

For reasons he couldn't really explain, he felt like was seeing something secret he wasn't supposed to, like that time he had peeked into a girl's bathroom on a dare and seen a Pack girl with her fly unzipped. He put the vinyls back in a hurry and threw an amp cover over them. The mystery of it though, remained.

His father ran the only radio station worth listening to for miles, jockeying discs in between news reports, tall tales and his own songs. He wasn't just a musician, he had explained to Griffin, he was an _artist_. There was probably nobody around with a guitar as good as his and, even if there somehow _was, _there was no way they could play as well as _he _could. Griffin was also pretty sure his dad was more famous than all the folks on those faded record covers. Even before they were all long dead, there was no way they had as many listeners as could be found in Nuka World. 

So his dad was Radio Boy. That was obvious. Griffin was a kid, but he wasn't an idiot-in fact, he was the smartest kid around, according to his dad. But Loony? They remained untraceable through the years.

**September. 2304 AD.**

Without a gang to claim him, Griffin spent most of his childhood floating around, hanging out with the kids of traders and unaffiliated raiders, most of them older and scrappier than him. It was three of these teenage boys who showed him his first spank magazine. An old and wrinkled affair with laminated pages and advertisements for male enhancement pills and sex toys in between dirty pictures.

He, honestly, found the whole thing really boring. Just a bunch of ladies, most of them looking kind of mad or bored or weirdly surprised, in various states of undress. Some were posing with props that he thought were pretty stupid-one girl in a cowboy hat posed with one of those plush horse heads on a stick. Another, in an apron and nothing else, was holding a pie and winking.

The only thing he thought was remotely interesting was that while they were mostly naked, their hair and makeup was always done up nicer than any Operator's. It just seemed backwards to him. He'd always figured the stuff on your head came off first before you got undressed or kissed anybody. He imagined kissing a girl with lipstick and felt a little bit sick.

But the older boys seemed absolutely enthralled and, desperate to feel included, he played along.

"That one's my favorite," a kid named Roger (who kept trying to get everyone to call him Throttle) said, pointing at a redhead woman in a skimpy sailor outfit.

"She's pretty," Griffin offered. "I like her smile." That part was true-she had perfect teeth and a smile that reached her eyes.

Another boy laughed. "Yeah, real great _smile_."

A betting pool ended up developing between the boys, each throwing in a few caps as a wager that could find a magazine to top this current one, and Griffin reluctantly pitched in his small allowance.

* * *

His dad mostly hung around their place when not running the radio all day and evening. They’d usually stay up listening to records and playing cards and trying to out-bullshit each other. They were, truthfully, his favorite hours. Far better than school or the time spent keening for the approval of the other kids. All he ever had to do to impress his dad was show up.

On occasion, though, his father would go out to Cappy’s or one of the Operators’ bars or the Pack’s fighting arena to drink and gamble and whatever else it was adults did in those parts of the park that his dad forbade him from visiting. It was a mystery that didn’t really interest him much. It was on one such night that Griffin spent over an hour rummaging through the drawers and nooks and crannies of their hut in search of something gross to try to win the pool. Nothing (which kind of made him feel better since it meant his dad had better things to do than look at girls).

What he did find, though, was her, folded up and buried in the back of his dad’s sock drawer. Three faded polaroids. The first was of a lady with blonde hair that fell to her shoulder in ringlets. She had blue eyes and full cheeks and a grin that nearly split her face in two. The way her arm was angled, he realized, meant she’d taken the picture herself.

On the back written in the same loopy handwriting as the note between the vinyls, was:

"Never forget a pretty face.   
\- Loony."

The second was taken in a mirror and harder to make out. She was indoors, a bed behind her, and standing sideways. The flash of the camera bulb swallowed her face. This one had no message at all. The last was of a sleeping baby’s face. On the bottom, it just said, "Griffin. 2092."

He sat there for a while, flipping through the photos, and even though the answer was right there for any twelve-year-old with a brain, he realized he didn’t really want to look at it.

"Did I ever have a mom?" he had asked years before and his dad had just shrugged like it was the most insignificant thing in the world.

"Who needs one of those when you’ve got the world’s coolest dad?"

And that had been it. It hadn’t really seemed that strange. A lot of the kids in the park only had a dad. Some only had a mom. Some didn’t even have that. There was a girl named Laura who was a year or two younger than him and always just seemed to be wandering around her own or hovering behind whichever Disciple was nearby. The word motherless had never really meant anything to him in a world where mothers weren’t a guarantee.

He didn’t put the pictures back or try to hide that he’d been snooping though he suspected he should have. When his dad came home, stinking of liquor and cigarettes, he found him sitting crosslegged on the floor and looking down at the photos.

"Bud-" he said blearily, recognition dawning on his face. 

"Who was she?"

His dad leaned against the door frame, wiping a hand over his face and looking more tired than he ever had before.

"That was uh... that’s your mom."

"You said I didn’t have a mom."

He squinted. "Did I? Oh fuck... I don’t think I said that"

"Where is she?"

"Shit, kid." He plunked a half-full bottle of beer down on his desk and all but fell into his chair. "Who knows?"

"Is she dead?"

"I mean, maybe? I have no clue."

"What do you mean?"

"I haven’t heard from her in..." he trailed off, staring at his hands. "What? Twelve years?"

"Where’d she go?"

"I don’t know."

Frustration started building up in his chest. These seemed like, he thought, the easiest answers in the world.

"How do you _not know?_"

"Hey, cool it," his dad snapped. "I mean _I don’t know_. No clue. Zero. Zip. One night she was here and the next morning she wasn’t. Took a bunch all her stuff and my favorite rifle and a bunch of my caps and bailed."

"She didn’t say bye?"

His dad frowned, looking anywhere but at him. "No. She just left a note."

"What’d it say?" There was a sick feeling he didn’t understand twisting in his gut. 

"Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters!"

He dad sighed, resting his head in his hands. "She said she tried her best but it wasn’t enough. She said to take care of you. That’s all."

"Tried her best at what?"

"Man, who knows? Me and her? Being your mom?"

"She didn’t want to be my mom?"

"I think... she did, at least a little," his dad said carefully. "But not enough to, you know, stay. It wasn’t about you or me. It was her."

Griffin said nothing for a while, staring at his supposed mother and her face breaking smile. "I don’t get it."

"Sometimes people don’t make a lot of sense."

"Why be a mom if you don’t wanna be a mom?"

"It’s not always that simple. Sometimes kids they, just, uh..." his dad waved his hand like he was trying to conjure up some explanation. "Happen."

"They just happen?"

"Yeah."

"Could that happen to me?"

"Whoa, uh- well, no, I don’t... no, you’re not gonna like wake up to a baby under your pillow or some shit. It’s not- not til you’re older."

"What if I don’t want a baby?"

"I mean there’s stuff you can um, do, but-" he sputtered, glancing around nervously. "It’s all, you know, complicated and I’ll uh... listen, you won’t understand it ‘til you’re older, okay?"

He let it lie, looking back to his mother. "Loony is a funny name."

"Her name was Loveday. Loony was just her stupid nickname."

"Loveday’s a stupid name, too."

He snorted. "Yeah, sure was."

"Do you miss her?"

"Nah."

"Why not?"

"Well- hey, what’s there to miss when I’ve got the world’s coolest son, yeah? Who needs some _girl_?"

Griffin wrinkled his nose. "I don’t."

"That’s right! See? None of this matters. It’s you and me." His dad rose, wobbly, and dropped to the floor, putting him in a headlock and rubbing his fist in his hair. 

Griffin laughed, wiggling, the sick feeling receding.

"Everyone else can fuck off!"

"Yeah!" Griffin beamed. "Everyone can fuck off!"

"Hey, man, watch your fucking mouth!"

They both collapsed into peals of laughter, his dad hugging him tight, and he almost forgot about his mother entirely, blissfully unaware that, in six years time, he, too, would pack up his things and slip away in the night, feeling for the first time in his life a kinship with the mother he had never really had. He would leave his father sleeping. He would leave him all alone.


	11. Gage

_"Shadows settle on the place that you left_  
_Our minds are troubled by the emptiness_  
_Destroy the middle, it's a waste of time_  
_From the perfect start to the finish line._ _"_

\- Daughter, "Youth"

* * *

**October 14th, 2310 AD.**

He's not sure what he expected. You can't have your years of feast without your years of famine. Problem is, he thought the latter had already come and gone, with all those fucking years he'd spent living off of scraps and _refusing_ to be glad for it, clawing through hunger and blood and gun smoke until he found his way to the top of the heap.

Twelve years on his parent's shitty little dust bowl of a farm down in the ass end of Texas, working the land til his hands bled and handing over what little yield they had to the raiders who had always blown through.

Four years as a knobby-kneed runaway doing anything and everything just to put some food in his mouth and caps in his pocket-caravan running, settlement repairs, guard duty, latrine pits digging.

Two years under Connor before he tasted the blunt edge of that moron's betrayal and came out the other end battered but toughened up like leather.

And all the decades in between then and Nuka World, latching onto whatever gang could hold its own until chems and infighting inevitably ate it from the inside out, or a tougher crew muscled its way into town. Then, on to the next one. And the next. And the next. Jumping across the South and then up the East Coast, collecting scars and bullet holes and a gnarled mound of scar tissue where an eye had once been until he ended up in the dirt patch of the Commonwealth and ran headlong into Colter.

One shit situation after the next. One chopping block followed by another. Far as he was concerned, Colter made the rest look like a fucking cakewalk. Thirty-four years he had climbed down through the rings of hell and in his thirty-fifth he'd met the devil.

But then it was worth it, wasn't it? It all had gotten him here, hadn't it?

Thirty-six years of hard scrabble living, spilled blood and twisted guts but there she stood at the end of it, pretty as a picture, that tiny woman in the electric blue Vault suit who stumbled into the Gauntlet and picked a water gun over becoming a smear on Cola Cars' floor. Thirty six years, plus a few months of park clearing and hard fucking work, and then finally his fucking feast. Nuka World went supernova with its as-seen-from-space lights, and she sat her pretty little ass down on the counter of a half-collapsed Bradberton house so he could get down on his knees and eat his fucking fill.

* * *

**December. 2287 AD.**

God, just _that_ alone. Ghoul corpses had been scattered through the streets outside and a radstorm had been cresting the horizon and none of that had mattered. He'd gone upstairs to case the house and see if it was a safe place to wait out the coming storm and, when he'd come back downstairs and rounded the corner into the kitchen, she'd been sitting there, freed of her armor and waiting. Fuck if he'd ever forget the way her skirt climbed up her thighs as she'd parted her legs _just _so and looked up at him through her lashes. 

His throat had been dry. "What's up, boss?"

She'd shrugged. "How's it looking?"

"It's uh..." She had slid her legs just a little farther apart and his neck had felt real hot. "Looks good. Don't see why we can't hunker down here for a bit, take a breather."

"Is that what you want?"

She had been wearing a little rag of an under shirt beneath her armor, the top buttons long lost, and when she had leaned forward, her cleavage had flashed into view. He had hesitated, glancing elsewhere and clearing his throat like a nervous fucking kid before his first fumble in the back of a burnt out old world car. He could've pretended not to see what she was doing, could've just made some excuse and gone upstairs, but, god, the high from seeing Nuka World come to fruition had been a heady one for days and she had had those pretty, narrow eyes and full, pouty lips and, well, _shit_.

"I don't know what I want," he had said stupidly and she had laughed.

"Start by taking off your armor. Stay a while."

He could've done a million different things but she was the prettiest thing he'd ever seen, with dark skin like walnut wood and black, shiny hair that spilled off her half-shaved head, and he hadn't put his hands all over anybody in a long fucking time. His armor had clanked on the hardwood floor and, somewhere between the entrance to the kitchen and her, he had shed logic like just another layer.

When he'd grabbed her by the hips, he'd wrenched her forward without a word, teeth on her throat, fingers kneading her ass. He'd bit and licked his way down to her collarbone and yanked off her shirt so hard she'd wobbled. Her tits hadn't even been a handful but he'd taken her in his mouth all the same, sucking so hard she had whined. God help him, she had really done his head in. Blew into his life like a fucking maelstrom, all big brain, foul mouth and hard head, and helped him build Nuka World up from the blood soaked ground.

(And something else, too, that he'd rather not think about. Something hidden under all that armor that made her snap the collars off of the traders first chance she got, offering them a one-way ticket out of Nuka World or fucking _pay _if they stayed to work; that had made her order a proper clinic be built for that know-it-all bitch of a doctor; that had made her graze a ravine gouged into his left bicep real gentle-like and look at younger raiders way too soft for her own good. But he had decided he wasn't gonna think about that because the word for it was _kind_, it was _good, _and the last thing he had wanted to worry about with his face pressed into a pair of tits and fingers slipping into her panties was saving the boss from her better nature).

Instead, he'd just slipped two fingers into her knuckle-deep. He was a little too rough, a little too fast, but she'd ground hard against his palm and, when he'd dropped to his knees and kissed up her thighs, she hadn't said a word in protest.

She'd tasted like skin and cunt and salty sweat and he had sworn to himself he'd never go hungry again.

* * *

**July. 2288 AD.**

Maybe he does know what he'd expected. Maybe he's just too fucking embarrassed now to admit he'd been a fool and forgotten what decades in the wasteland had hammered into his head: no good thing can last, no matter how hard you try and pretend. Sure, it had been so _easy_ to pretend when you had someone like the boss running the show and, in between hard knock negotiations, draping herself buck-naked across your bed like one of them sleek and shiny old world pin-ups, but easy things had a price. Always did.

He had thought it had arrived when the Institute had come a'knocking, Disciple girl stumbling into Nuka Town one morning, covered in blood and carrying what looked like her own head. She'd screamed for someone to bring a cleaver and, when she had split it open, plunged her hand into the brains that had slopped out and yanked the synth component free. A week later, news had come that six civilians had been mowed down by a duplicate in Diamond City and that a siege had begun on the Minutemen's castle.

"You know what this means," Aiko had said, lying next to him in bed, her gaze faraway as she stared at the ceiling. "They're getting bolder. This is just the beginning."

He'd rested a warm hand on her thigh and turned to look at her. "Nuka World's a fortress."

"Not if they infiltrate us." Her voice had shaken.

He hadn't bothered to say anything. They had both known she was right.

It had been in the dead of that night that he'd found her sobbing in the bathroom, tucked into the corner, knees drawn against her chest.

"Boss," he'd said carefully, unease tiptoeing up his spine. "Hey, don't... don't do that."

"We're fucked."

"Aw, come on, we just gotta draw up a plan and-"

"No, you don't understand-"

"Boss, you think I ain't been up against shitty odds? We ain't fucked until you start losing your fucking head-"

"I'm _pregnant_, you asshole," she'd spat. "I'm _fucked_."

The words had bounced around in his skull but refused to settle down and sink in. He'd heard her wrong-wasn't any reason to think that, but it's what he'd decided as she let out another sob and furiously rubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes.

* * *

'Til now, he'd figured that had been the price: his bastard in her belly and a bloody but expedient war that ended up costing them more than a few of their own, but had ended almost as quickly as it had begun. And with it went the boogeymen of the Commonwealth and decades upon decades of folks vanishing in the night. There had been enough misery and uncertainty and bloodshed that he had assumed that had been it. Karma's last strike.

He doesn't know how he let himself get so fucking complacent.

It's like a blur now. A horrid little picture show faded by time and stress and a want to forget: a Pack member's duplicate strung up over Nuka World's main entrance; an Operator's duplicate taking five others with her on a raid when she detonated her own mine; those glowing, skeletal, early synth models storming an outpost at the edge of the Commonwealth; and, the whole time, Aiko on edge, her rounding belly hidden only for so long beneath her armor before the gig was up. He's pretty sure that, if they hadn't all had to band together against a singular threat, Nisha, smelling blood and seeing weakness, would've sunk a knife deep into Aiko's back and taken the park for herself.

They'd gotten lucky. Ahmya had been born, red and squalling, three weeks before the war came to an end in early 2289. Clean up lasted some time after and, by the time Nisha's sights had honed back in on Aiko, the boss was back on her feet.

Despite his recurring urge to pick up sticks and fucking run, they'd figured it out. Kid was healthy and placid and, despite his better judgment, he'd gotten kind of used to having her around before she was even really, well, _around_. They hadn't talked about it until towards the end when she'd all but grabbed him by the ears and yanked to his senses, but, not long before it was all over, Aiko had developed a tendency of wordlessly leading his hand to her rounding stomach and holding it there while the kid had kicked around inside.

At some point, nights had devolved into him holding her against his chest, nose buried in her hair and fingers exploring her abdomen, prodding until something moved in reply.

"Leave them alone," she had muttered once and he'd shocked himself by pressing a kiss to her scalp. "I'm trying to sleep."

“They’re moving anyhow.” He'd dragged a finger along the strange, dark line that had descended from her navel, feeling something shift under her skin. "What is that?"

"What?"

"Moving. Right there."

She'd grunted, swatting him. "Hands. Now fuck off."

And then Ahmya'd come and, well, an exhausted boss was as good as a dead one and Aiko had seemed real keen on not just ignoring the kid, so he'd found himself getting up late at night whenever Ahmya cried and sitting on a couch out on the patio, legs propped up on the low coffee table, kid nursing a bottle while nestled in the crook of his arm. It was a trip, whether he had wanted to admit it or not. He'd just sort of sit there and stare at her in the dim light cast by the park as it filtered through the Grille's windows. Her impossibly tiny nose and lips were mirror images of Aiko's; hell, her whole face was. Only time there was proof he'd kicked in any genetics at all was when she was awake and staring back at him with his hazel-green eyes. Least she had two of 'em, he'd thought, and suddenly felt a level of panic that made him feel sick because, one day, that could change.

* * *

**October. 2310 AD.**

Hitomi is sitting next to him, her face buried against his shoulder, and weeping so hard she's hiccuping. Finn's leaning against the doorway of the Grille, staring into the middle distance. Every now and then, his face twitches like he wants to say something, but he can't seem to form the words.

"It's my fault," Hitomi sobs, hugging his arm.

Gage's head is throbbing and he's desperately wishing Aiko hadn't made him stay home to keep things, as she put it, in control. Truth be told, he's pretty sure she's just afraid that these kids'll make a break for it, too, if they both take their eyes off of them for more than a second.

"Ain't your fucking fault," he mutters. Tears? These aren't his fucking department. Aiko's the one they all go scrambling to when they need someone to hold them and soothe them and kiss shit better. Well, not all. Not Ahmya. He realizes he can't remember the last time he saw her cry. When she was eight, she'd twisted her ankle when running reckless in Dry Rock Gulch and he hadn't even realized anything was wrong until she'd tried to walk ahead of him and he'd spotted a limp.

"We always fight," Hitomi insists. "Sometimes, I don't even know why."

"Pretty sure it's because you're always taking her shit. That's probably why she left," Finn mutters and Gage shoots him a glare.

"Watch it."

"Or what?" Finn snaps. "It's true."

"She didn't leave because your sister took her shit."

"How do you know?"

"'Cause that's a dumb fucking reason to leave and Ahmya ain't a moron."

"No, so maybe we should just let her go. She probably got sick of this dump and knows she can make it on her own."

If he wasn't so fucking exhausted, he'd be pushed awful close to lashing out, his kid or not. "Careful, dumbass, you're talking to one of the people who built this 'dump,' which is the only reason none of you have wanted for shit, by the way."

Finn crosses his arms and sneers at the floor. He looks the most like Gage out of the three. Got his eyes and jaw and curly hair, but his mom's dark complexion and flat nose. Give him a few years and he'll probably pack on muscle like his old man, too. It's not his fault, but sometimes Gage feels a flare of resentment because all he sees when he looks at him is himself at seventeen: dumb as shit but convinced he's got the whole world figured out down to the letter. Only difference is his kid hasn't ever had to do shit for himself (_and whose fucking fault is that?_).

Hitomi's tears have subsided and now she's just curled against him, limp and shivering. He wraps an arm around her and holds her tight against his chest.

Truth be told, he'd kind of figured that if anyone was to disappear in the night, it'd be one of them. Finn because he'd get it in his head he was gonna go be a big man or defy his parents by going to hold an honest job in Diamond City or some shit. Anything to be contraire. Or Hitomi because, well, she's prone to theatrics. A curt word here, a chastising there, and she starts threatening to run away. To where? Like she fucking knows. The waterworks and empty threats of a young teen with nothing better to worry about.

The difference is both of them would turn back. Ahmya? She's her father's daughter through and through. When she makes up her mind, she sticks to it. If she wants to leave, she's gone, and she did, so she is. That's all there is to it.

Aiko's down there talking to the other bosses, because it seems a whole gaggle of idiot kids got it in their heads to bolt, not the least of 'em belonging to Mason, Nisha, Mags and William, and he barely knows what the point is. Ahmya's clever and she's got a head start. He can't think of where she'd go even though he knows her best, so the odds of them tracking her down are slim to none.

She's gone.

He feels a horrible sick he can barely suppress rising in his gut. She's twenty-one; not even a kid anymore to anyone but her folks. She's smart and careful and as skilled with her fists as much as she is with guns. He's taught her every survival technique he knows, and she stole a shotgun, whole sack of ammo, rations, chems and a mess of toiletries. If any of these kids has a chance to make it, it's her. He saw to that.

She'll be fine. She'll be tough. She'll make it. He doesn't have to worry.

But he's here and she's still gone.


	12. Mags

**Trigger Warning: Childbirth, mention of stillbirth.**

* * *

"_In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments._" 

\- Cormac McCarthy, _All the Pretty Horses_

* * *

**December, 12th, 2291 AD.**

She thought him dead. Eight months of misery to thirteen hours of agony to silence. 

She was almost delirious from pain at that point, drenched in sweat and sleep deprived and dizzy with an agony more horrific than she could have ever conceived. And embarrassed; among everything else, wholly and unspeakably _embarrassed_. Kneeling over a mat in her bedroom in the company of that worm of a doctor, heaving and panting and eventually screaming (she had promised herself she would not scream, but then the feeling of being rent in two had come and her resolve had been torn apart), she felt like something dumb and bestial. 

Diamond City biology lessons and old world diagrams had promised her a birth on her back. They had promised her some shred of dignity.

When the pains had first begun the morning before, she had just laid in bed for hours, half-believing them to be false contractions, with her insides clenching like a fist and her only company the nameless stranger crammed under her ribs. Come evening time, during a particularly horrid contraction, she had felt something warm flush down her inner thighs and, trying to remain collected, finally gotten up to demand that William retrieve the doctor.

It was too early, she knew that. Three and a half weeks premature. But she had also done enough research to be aware that there was no plugging such a dam. She had a task to complete and there had been no point in dwelling on the particulars once past the point of no return.

So hours and hours had followed of her clenching her teeth and pacing and doubling over until that fucking doctor had peered and prodded between her legs, then told her to crouch like a fucking animal at the foot of her bed and, for Christ's sake, _push already_. Any other time and she would have plugged a bullet between the woman's eyes for her tone alone, had her corpse left for back alley rats to gnaw on, but it ended up that childbirth had the unique ability to drive even the best of them to their knees.

When he had finally crowned, her vision had swam and she had thought, through the searing pain, _I am dying_ with such clarity that she didn't even have the strength to be afraid. This was it, she had rolled the dice and it had been a mistake and she was going to die and- and then a horrible sliding sensation and, on its tail, a shocking emptiness. The doctor, kneeling in front of her, had caught a slippery mass in her outstretched hands, and now, just now, there was only silence.

"Why isn't it crying?" she demanded, head still spinning. "What's wrong?"

_It's dead. Just like Lizzie's. Blue and limp. There is a god and you're being punished. You, but not that bastard Gage or that evil cunt Nisha. You-_

"It's a boy," the doctor managed, sounding confused. "He's alive, he's fine, it's just-"

Mags' vision steadied and she looked down and saw him. Small, yes, but very much alive and whole. Covered in blood and some sort of foul, waxy substance, and wriggling in the doctor's hands. His mouth opened so wide he looked like he was trying to unhinge his jaw and his tongue was curling and his chest was heaving, but there only came the sound of his tiny, gasping breaths.

"What's wrong?" she demanded, panic feeding into fury. "What's wrong with him?"

"I- I don't know. His airway seems clear. He's clearly breathing. He just isn't making noise-"

"Why the fuck not? What did you do?"

"Nothing," she insisted, suddenly paling and clearly remembering whose child it was, exactly, she was holding. "I didn't do anything-"

Mags' dizziness flared back up and her voice warbled from her crashing adrenaline. "Then what did I do?"

"You- Please, sit back and we'll figure this out, okay? Sit back against the bed. Now hold out your arms." With little warning, the child was thrust against her chest and she nearly dropped him in shock. "Careful! Careful, support his head. Good, good."

He was too light, she thought, as she stared at his red, wrinkled face, her arms stiff. His fists balled and his face screwed itself up so tightly he barely even looked human. He was too small and he was probably going to die and no one would even know why. All that time, pain and investment for nothing at all.

* * *

She named him Alexander, for the conqueror, and hoped (stupidly, childishly, secretly) that that alone would somehow give him strength. At the very least, he lived.

Within hours of entering the world, he had slackened and mellowed, staring at her and randomly twitching his limbs, and when he finally managed to latch - an hour, it took, for something so pathetically _simple_ \- it had felt like needles where shifting underneath her skin. She'd read somewhere that there was supposed to a hormone released during breastfeeding to induce a sort of high, nature's trick for scrubbing away the ugliness of birth and lulling you into feeling some sort of softness for the ugly, little creature that had put you through it. She was starting to bitterly doubt her hit was coming.

God, he _was_ ugly, though. Wrinkled and scrawny with a slightly pointed skull and blotchy flesh. Her mother had always cooed to anyone who would listen that _her Maggie_ had been the most beautiful baby from the moment she was born, just an absolute _angel_, and Mags thought now that she had probably been lying about that, just like everything else.

"I imagine I was as ugly as you," she dully informed the baby as he pulled away, halo of milk on his lips, and blinked sleepily up at her. "I hope that that crushed her."

Alexander only yawned in reply and wrapped a tiny hand around the finger that she offered him.

"That's what she would have concerned herself with: a doll too ugly to show off." She paused, studying his impossibly minute fingernails, his blonde eyelashes. "No thoughts on my potential. I won't make the same mistake."

His eyelids drooped and he released her finger, curling against her chest.

* * *

**October 14th, 2310 AD.**

She can hear Lizzie sobbing from her bedroom (pathetic and wretched, like a wounded animal) as she sits at the long table. The sound grates the inside of her skull and she thinks bitterly, "The best laid plans of mice and men."

Melker had tried to warn her, hadn't he? When he had returned a week after Alex's birth from a job off of the coast, clothes smelling of sea salt and low tide, he had taken his son into his arms the minute he had walked through the Parlor doors. She will give him credit for that, if she must-he had been enthralled from the start.

Later that night, she had sat on the edge of her bed and he had settled in the leather chair across from her, Alex dozing against his chest. "You'll have to uh... tailor things, yes?"

"Tailor things?"

"How they say it, with expectations." He had nodded down towards the child. "For him."

She had stiffened. "And what is that supposed to mean?"

"Maybe not the heir you planned-"

"Our people will have years to adapt."

"Mags-"

"I didn't go through all of _that_ for nothing," she had said coolly and he must have, for a moment, forgotten himself, because the look he had shot her had been so withering she had almost flinched.

"No, you didn't. You went through it for _him_. Our son, yeah? You remember?"

"Careful," she had warned. "You're lucky I'm even letting you see him. Our agreement-"

"I am not telling you what to do. I am telling you, maybe, what you expect-"

"_My_ son does not deserve lesser expectations."

But he had been right.

Melker has a nasty way of sneaking up on her like this-through hindsight-even after all these years, his flesh long rotted from his bones.

Alex had grown from a weak infant into a sickly child who had preferred building blocks and postage stamps and climbing into her lap above all else. Loud noises had never stopped startling him and his muteness had evolved into a source of significant shyness and unease. The other Operator children, born in his wake, had tolerated him as the boss's son and little else, any genuine companionship he had received coming from Elise and Elise alone.

"He's sensitive," Melker had taken to saying whenever he stopped by, often with stamps and those stupid fucking brochures in tow. "We're lucky he's so smart."

"Smart is only one thing he needs to be."

"He's young. One day, who knows?" But that had been to placate her. Melker had known. He always fucking had.

Their son would never be a leader; worse still, it would seem he had become a follower.

She looks at the map spread before her as if it will suddenly alight with some great revelation. A glowing target, maybe, flashing over wherever it is her idiot son has gone. Clever and thoughtful as he was, he still didn’t have even nineteen years under his belt and his life had been, quite frankly, too free of edges. Even in him, there had been inklings of that special kind of foolishness inherent to teenage boys-sneaking out to chug beers at his peers' urging, only to blow his own cover by vomiting in the lobby at three in the morning; begging for a tattoo; wasting his time morosely pining over some secret girl, as evidenced by a stack of horrid love poems he had once forgotten out on his desk-but it had never been the reckless kind of foolishness. It had never been selfish. It had never cost _her _anything.

No, he would never leave on his own without prompting or warning, she decides. He had to have been swayed. Maybe, she thinks bitterly, by whatever idiot girl had so enraptured him.

_We'll find him,_ she tells herself. _We'll find him and the rest of these morons and we'll make them pay for the cost and... _And then she wasn't sure. Make them stay? Bribe them? Bully them? Beg them? Not that, no. Never in her life.

But he had lived inside her once and she feels a sort of phantom pain.

He had held her hand tightly whenever they ventured beyond the park for target practice until he was at least twelve.

He had spent his whole childhood sitting as close to her as he could at dinner, often scooting vegetables onto her plate and trying not to smile as she feigned ignorance before coolly stating that she just _could not _recall having _that _many beets.

He had begged her to sit with him countless nights while he leafed through the stamp album he'd already perused a million times before (until his father had died and the album he had helped him build had been shut tight and shoved under his bed, never to be opened again).

It's only now that something clicks and she stands, crossing the dining room and wandering down the hall to his bedroom, its door ajar. She barely even registers what it is she's doing until she's already down on her knees and peering under his bed, staring at only dust bunnies and a few stray caps.

The floorboards creak behind her. "Mags?" William asks, standing in the doorway.

"He took the album," she says flatly, sitting back on her heels.

"What?"

"His stupid fucking stamp album."

"So?"

"He's never coming back."


	13. RedEye

"_April, come she will_  
_When streams are ripe and swelled with rain._  
_May, she will stay_  
_Resting in my arms again._  
_June she'll change her tune,_  
_In restless walks she'll prowl the night._

_July, she will fly_  
_And give no warning to her flight_."  
\- Simon & Garfunkel, "April Come She Will"

* * *

**October 14th, 2310 AD.**

He'd woken up with a crick in his neck and an ache between his temples. Sharp slats of sunlight had slanted through the gaps between his window's blinds and he had groaned, draping his forearm over his eyes. No telling what time it was. It had been his day off and he'd maybe thrown back a little too much whiskey the night before while shooting the shit with some assholes down at Cappy's. His eyes had creaked open and he'd rubbed away the grit, rolling onto his side and reaching for the pack of cigarettes on his nightstand. Empty. Of course.

He had groaned again, climbing uneasily out of bed and trudging into the shack's main room, half of it dominated by a kitchen counter, steel sink and loudly humming fridge. He'd flicked on the hot plate and started to fill the coffee pot from the sink, skull humming along with that stupid fucking fridge.

"Hey, Griff, wanna do me a solid and run to the Market to grab some cigarettes? I'll spot you plus something extra." Several seconds had passed without reply. "Griff?"

He'd turned off the tap and crossed the room to Griffin's bedroom door, knocking lightly. "You up?"

Silence. Inching the door open, he had leaned his head in. "I hope you're not-"

Griffin's room was small and barely furnished, with a cot, tiny fold-out desk and chair, green steamer trunk and cardboard box filled to the brim with comic books. There was an old dissected radio on his desk, wires spilling out like guts, and a technicolor poster for _The Beast With A Trillion Eyes_ pasted to the wall. Dirty socks were littered across the floor and his guitar stand sat empty.

Russell had glanced at the Nuka alarm clock sitting on the floor beside the bed: 9:45 AM. He had rolled his eyes-this had become something of a habit lately, kid slipping out in the night to chug cheap beer and light fireworks with his punk friends in the construction lot out behind the Safari Zone. Griffin hadn't ever been much trouble, really, so Russell had caught himself offguard with panic the first time he'd opened the door to an empty bed, son so piss drunk he'd fallen asleep on a ratty couch some kids had set up next to a bonfire.

Otherwise, the kid had usually spent as much time mucking around with old tech in his room as he did roaming the parks with his friends and doing odd jobs for spare caps. Hung around the Nukacade a whole lot lately, learning the ropes from Frisk, and Nuka Radio station, learning much the same from his old man. Kid was a fucking sponge when it came to circuits and hardware and old world tech.

“Took the fucking guitar this time,” he’d muttered. “Some drunk idiot’s gonna bust—” His words petered off. Sitting on Griffin’s desk, behind the radio, had been a square of folded paper, “Dad” scrawled across it.

He had picked it up and unfolded it and, for some reason—instinct? logic?—his throat had gone real fucking dry.

“You were the best. This isn’t because of you. I love you.

\- Griffin.”

Now, he's just sitting on the foot of Griffin's bed, staring blankly at a knot in the shack's shitty floor. He'd wandered back out to the kitchenette in a daze, made himself a cup of coffee and promptly set it down on the counter to go cold. The Overboss had come by not long after, pretty face frazzled to hell and eyes red with split blood vessels. She'd handed him a piece of paper she needed him to read on air about missing kids and reporting unusual activity and he'd stared at it like he couldn't remember what words were.

She'd asked him where Griffin was and he'd realized he wasn't coming back.

* * *

**March. 2292 AD.**

He woke up around ten-o'clock, jolted awake by his fucking Cappy alarm clock with its shrill, little song.

"What if there was a place with all the zip-"

He smacked the off button, groaning, and rolled over to an empty space. Small divot in the mattress, thread of blonde hair on the pillowcase, the smell of her in the sheets. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes before hauling himself out of bed.

Loveday got up early, sometimes, and surprised him with coffee on the days when she was feeling lively. Sometimes, if he was lucky, she'd draw him back to bed and let him clamor on top of her, dizzy with want or need or maybe both. Those were the best days, standing in sharp contrast to the ones where life absconded her. Those mornings, he'd find her sitting in their shack's threshold, front door thrown wide, her feet planted on the cinderblock steps as she stared blankly ahead. Those mornings, he made her coffee and could barely pry a word out of her.

They scared him, truth be told, after everything. She had only been back from her great vanishing act for a couple of months-returned, one night, wiry and sopping with rain, a newborn baby who looked way too much like him strapped to her chest-and, sometimes, a great misery seemed to randomly toll through her skull so loud he couldn't hope to reach her.

"Loony?" He stepped into their main room. The hotplate was unplugged and the coffee pot was still upturned on the drying rack next to a couple glass baby bottles. At the market, then. She did that sometimes, too.

He turned and opened the door to what had once been his storage space for bits, bobs and bullshit and now made for a shoddy nursery with a hand-me-down crib, wood changing table stacked with cloth diapers and a patchy but plush teddy in the corner. He hadn't exactly had much time to throw it all together and make it into anything worth looking at. He wondered if that redhead Mason was always hovering around could make taxidermy mobiles. Nothing creepy, just something to decorate the space.

"I don't what he needs," he'd confessed to Mackenzie not long after Loveday returned, kid squalling in his arms. "I've got no fucking clue and she won't do _anything_."

It _had_ gotten better, though. Exponentially, really. Loveday had opened up, little-by-little, and when the baby cried, she was now keener to answer.

"Where did you go?" he'd asked.

"The Commonwealth."

"Yeah, but _where?_"

"Sunshine Tidings. They're a Minutemen settlement—"

"_Minutemen?_"

She'd frowned, looking away. "They were real safe and they had everything you could need. I barely asked and they took me in."

"But you had everything you needed here," he'd argued, embarrassed by how broken-up he sounded.

"When I realized..." She'd fidgeted, still not looking at him, and tears had started to prick up in her eyes. "I don't know, I got scared, okay? I was going to leave him there, but then I saw him and I though of you and..."

"Hey, hey— listen, forget it. It's fine. You're here now."

It had been a lie, but one he was willing to tell if it meant she'd stay. A part of him honestly hated her for how she'd left—just vanished one day without a word—and even more so for how she'd returned, but, even then, all of that was overshadowed by the desperate ache he'd felt in her absence and the idea of her back. Someone to wake up to. Someone to rely on.

"Hey, bud," he said now, leaning over the crib's railing as Griffin, all big eyes and uncanny resemblance, blew spit bubbles and smiled up at him.

This was new--before, he'd mostly just looked at people blankly or, worse, burst into tears over seemingly nothing, to the point he felt less like a person you could interact with and more like a very loud, troubled sack of potatoes. Russell wasn't keen to admit it, but there _was _something about having a little mini-me who smiled at your stupid mug with pure, unadulterated joy.

"Look who's up!"

He scooped him up, shifting him into a one-armed hold as he stepped back into the main room and plugged in the hot plate, before filling a saucepan with water. "You hungry?"

Griffin responded by cramming the collar of his t-shirt into his mouth and salivating all over it.

"Great, thanks."

It wasn't until he went to grab a bottle that he saw it, folded neatly next to the drying rack where she knew he'd end up eventually. "Russell" was scrawled on it in her loopy handwriting.

"I tried but I know that's not enough. I'm sorry. I know that's not enough, either. Take care of him. He's the best thing I ever done.

\- Loveday."

The words just kind of stuck to the page. Try as he might, he couldn't peel them off and plug them into his still-groggy brain.

_ I was going to leave him there but.._.

He opened the front door and stepped outside, squinting under the migraine-inducing sunlight and scanning the empty lot next to Cola Cars where the Overboss had had some grunts build him the shack as payment for the good light he painted her in.

For some reason, he stood there like a moron in his ratty Hubris Comics t-shirt and flannel pajama pants and thought, "She won't be gone too long."


	14. Elise

**October 19th, 2310 AD.**

They leave early, once the storm has cleared but some hours before dawn breaks, fueled by a only few hours of miserable sleep and a breakfast of tinny-tasting canned food. Save for Moira swearing when she was woken up and Ahmya suggesting that they continue along the main road, they yanked on their armor and packed up their gear in silence. As they had prepared to leave, Alex had asked her yet again it she was okay and she had only shrugged.

She had dreamt that she had returned home and found her mother sitting on the foot of her bed, her father nowhere in sight. When she had told her was sorry, she’d realized her mother couldn’t see her.

It’s so dark now that they can barely see more than a few feet in front of them. The sun is still hours away from rising and the moon is almost completely blotted out by lingering storm clouds. Moira cranks an old flashlight as they head out through the front doors and trains the beam ahead, careful not to shine it too high up. No point in being more visible than they have to be.

The air is damp and low-lying fog hugs the patchy asphalt of the road. What few buildings there are lay in heaps, broken silhouettes barely visible against the darkness.

They walk in a sort of formation—Ahmya’s idea. If someone strikes from the front, Moira will shrug it off and deal a nasty surprise; from the back and Rukmani will sense anyone before they can get too close. Ahmya keeps to the center, radiating warmth to keep the cold out of everyone’s bones, and she and Alex walk flank on either side.

Every time wind rustles through the trees and bushes that have risen up to reclaim the ruins, her neck prickles.

They march on for almost an hour with nothing to show for it. More random caved buildings—factories and storage facilities, she reasons—and weedy fields. Her boots are cutting into her feet and she can feel blisters forming. Not for the first time, she wishes that she had stayed behind at camp with Griffin and the others even though that would defeat her entire reason for coming at all. 

Suddenly, Alex snaps his fingers and her head snaps in his direction: he’s pointing towards an orange glow pulsing in the distance.

“What’s that?” she asks for him.

“What’s what?” Ahmya answers.

“That light?”

The group slowly comes to a stop, everyone squinting.

“Fire?” Moira offers and Ahmya nods. “What d’ya think it’s from?”

Ahmya shrugs. “Lightning, maybe. Or trouble.”

“Maybe we should go see—”

“You miss the ‘trouble’ part?”

Alex signs in the dark and Elise barely catches what he’s saying, before she speaks for him again, “We could scout from a distance.”

“Yeah, or we could keep going how we said—”

“We keep going this way, we’re not gonna see anything for ages,” Moira moans, hands on her hips.

“Sorry, since when is this a fucking sightseeing tour? You wanna waste your time pokin’ around places you’ve got no business, have at it, but I’m out here to find somewhere to put our people.”

“Us taking a little detour won’t kill them.”

“It’s not too far,” Alex signs and Elise translates. “We can keep our distance.”

“Why the fuck do you wanna go?”

Alex shrugs. “If there’s dangers near this road, we should know before we bring everyone down it.”

“Fuck it, how about a vote. Who’s in favor of us not risking our necks for nothing?”

There’s a drawn silence, Alex and Moira glancing fleetingly at each other, the latter looking baffled by the sudden ally, and Elise knowing that, despite the creeping unease in her gut, she has to shadow her cousin wherever he went. Eyes on his back. That was her promise.

“Fine. Great. If we die, it’s you jackasses’ fault,” Ahmya mutters and Moira breaks first from the road, heading northeast towards the light. 

The field is muddy and sucks at their boots and Elise feels a shiver of disgust when some splashes onto her tights. Great. More filth to add to the pile. She’s not sure she’s ever gone more than a day without bathing and the grime on her skin and in her hair is starting to make her feel ill.

They don’t walk for long before the acrid smell of burning wood and gasoline spills over them, chasing away the stink of mud, fresh rain and rotting autumn leaves. Fifteen minutes or so, and they can see the towers of smoke stacking into the sky, dark against the now unmistakable glare of fire. She understands, for the first time, what people mean when they say fire roars—it sounds like the call of something dragged straight out of hell.

The ground declines ever so slightly, vegetation petering away to silty dirt, and they crouch behind a nest of dead bushes and small trees standing on the edge of the barrenness. 

Alex squints through his night vision scope, before signing, “It looks like a settlement. Whole thing’s on fire.”

“Anyone there?”

“Doubt it.”

“Rukmani?”

“Have to get closer to check.”

Elise realizes then that this is the first time she’s heard the girl, hovering still at the back of the group, speak since last night.

“Okay, we’ll—”

Rukmani rises fluidly before Ahmya can finish and brings her hands together at the center of her chest, hooking her fingers into something that is not there and wrenching it open like a set of heavy curtains. There comes a soft crackling sound, a smell like ozone, and the thin air tears open before them, the edge of the fire suddenly only inches away. Heat and ash flood over them in a horrible current and they all, save for Ahmya, duck, coughing, their eyes watering. After a second, the portal blinks shut and the fire is, once again, in the distance.

“There’s no one there,” Rukmani says.

“You want to warn us before shoving our faces into a fire next time?” Elise seethes.

“I didn’t shove anything anywhere.”

“You know what I mean—”

“Both of you shut up,” Ahmya snaps. “There’s nothing to see here. Let’s head back to the road.”

Alex taps Elise’s shoulder before her dander can raise, pointing beyond the trees.

“What?”

“Moira.”

“Wha— oh, for fuck’s sake, Moira, come back!”

In seconds, it would seem, Moira has already shed her bag and slipped through the tree line to jog towards the smoldering settlement, the tail of her loose, blue linen skirt trailing like smoke behind her.

“The fuck is she— goddamnit, everybody stay here,” Ahmya mutters before giving chase, and Alex kneels back down to peer through his scope.

“I guess we’ll just—“

“I’m going,” Rukmani says, yanking at the air again and pulling a second portal to life, the smoke and heat returning.

“Ahmya said—”

“Since when is she in charge?”

Alex rises and signs quickly—“We don’t want her thinking we follow orders”—and, before she can argue that this is about cohesion and not submission, he’s holding his arm over his nose and mouth and stepping through the tear. Elise groans, but follows, and a horrible feeling like full-body static shudders through her before they’re on the other side.

They fall into step just as Ahmya grabs Moira by the wrist and yanks her to a stop, shouting over the din, “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I wanted a closer look—“

“This ain’t what we agreed!”

“I don’t need your permission,” Moira spat, spinning around and yanking her arm free. 

Ahmya glances back and throws her arms out at her sides, exasperated. “I fucking told y’all—”

“They don’t need your permission, either!”

“Shut up, Moira!”

There had been, maybe, a dozen buildings before the fire took to them, swallowing them completely and whittling them down to burning skeletons. Metal frames, she guesses, since they’re still standing. It’s like one of those strange nightmares where you wander until a random disaster presents itself in the middle of your path and you want to leave, you want to head back, but the sheer strangeness of it captivates you.

There’s no one sound but the fire and no settlers huddled together as their homes burn. Nothing. Just a ghost town in the middle of nowhere going down in flames.

“Lightning?” she asks loudly, because the others have now all gone quiet and are just staring, too. The heat is smothering, sweat pouring down her face.

“Where is everybody then?” Ahmya counters.

“People die in house fires all the—”

“If it was lightning, it would’ve started at one point. You’re telling me nobody got out before it spread? No guards saw anything?”

“Maybe they didn’t have guards.”

“They ain’t got a wall and they ain’t got guards? Come on.”

“Farmers are stupid!”

“You don’t make it out here long enough to build a bunch of houses if you’re a moron.”

“They might be prewar—”

“A dozen prewar houses with nothin’ else around them?”

“The fire happened after,” Rukmani says, barely loud enough to breech the scream of fire.

“After what?”

“After someone strung them all up from that tree.”

Immediately, she doesn’t want to look. She’s never been on a raid—such a thing would have broken her mother—and her father had kept her target training restricted to mannequins and loosed animals. She’s good—better, he said, than some of his best—but she’s never squeezed a trigger and watched a man die.

She’s never even seen a corpse up close, the wildness and bloodlust of Nuka World long contained to the Pack and Disciples’ parks. When bodies had occasionally turned up in alleyways, often in pieces, she had always turned away.

But Rukmani is pointing and she knows, deep in her gut, that the world isn’t made for her, for weepy children who dream of their mothers and cry for their fathers, for stupid girls with a taste for silver spoons and views from ivory towers.

So she makes herself look, slowly, after the others, and sees that there hang from a distant, dead oak, just beyond the reach of the fire and lit by the glare, a few dozen bodies, swinging in the breeze.

She thinks, “I was wrong: the roar of fire is the call of hell itself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can now follow me at allthezipofnukacola.tumblr.com!


	15. Rukmani

_"They'll hang me in the morning on a scaffold yea big_  
_To dance upon nothing to the tyborn jig._

_The horse is steady but the horse is blind,  
Wicked are the branches on the tree of mankind."_

\- Tom Waits, "Sins of My Father"

* * *

**October 19th, 2310 AD.**

Thirty-six. Thirty-six people. Fifteen hanging in the old oak tree and eleven in another younger one, not far off. She counts twice to be sure. Then a third time, because three is a lucky number (except not here, she supposes; three fits into thirty-six twelve times and look what that got these sheep).

A fact: the air is a tapestry you cannot see. When people are alive, they breathe and move and live against the threads, plucking and tugging their way through space. Up close, with a clear head, she can catch their vibrations and follow them to their sources as you would a wire that's gone taut. Her sister once said, "It's like how spiders find the flies in their webs," but that's not true. Not really. She didn’t lay the threads; they have always been here.

Be quiet. Feel. You need only pay attention.

The dead, though, are harder to find. Swing a corpse and she probably won't sense it. Their cells are still, the tremor of life squeezed out of them.

She only noticed the stinking bounty hanging in the trees because she likes to look where others don't. A crowd watches a fire and so an arsonist escapes.

The others turn to look when she speaks, Ahmya and Moira without hesitation and Alex with a sort of grim resignation. Elise hesitates, though, stutters a little and struggles to turn her head. A spoiled, nervous brat with no stomach for what survival takes. She is weak and her days are numbered.

"Oh my god," Elise whispers, shrinking beside Alex. "Kids."

She's right. At least a dozen are children, some so young they likely barely spoke. Elise doesn't realize it doesn't matter in the end: they all swing the same.

"Seems like a whole lotta work," Moira offers, squinting. "I mean, how long you figure hanging 'em up took?"

"Who cares?" Elise shudders. "We need to go."

Rukmani lets her skin relax and open to the air, feels the threads. Still. No one else is here. Not for a ways, at least.

"Nobody's here."

"They might come back!"

Alex puts a hand on his cousin's shoulder and cocks his head to the left, away from the fire and what soon will be an orchard of bone and rotting meat.

"I'm fine," Elise insists and Rukmani feels a quiver in her. Nerves. Liar.

Meanwhile, Ahmya, has turned away, peering towards the tumult of fire and ash. Rukmani wonders if it's calling to her, before she tracks her gaze and realizes it's a large outcrop of rock that's captured her attention. Looks to be an upturned slab of concrete. Piece of road, maybe. Stood on its side to make a sign. Whatever was carved into it is now overshadowed by words scrawled over the stone in white paint that had blistered and ran beneath the fire's heat before drying:

_Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones._

_Psalm 137:9_

And a plank of wood propped up nearby:

_FATHER CONWAY SEETH THE DEMONS IN OUR MIDST._

"If you're ever afraid and don't fight it," her mother had once told her, "all you're doing is letting everybody else see you sweat."

Except they're all sweating now. The fire is climbing and there are god-words painted on stone. Wasn't there something like this in a holy book that Sherry, the school teacher, had mentioned? Rukmani could barely remember. She had only gone to the schoolhouse on occasion, when there was no one around to watch her.

Something about a man on a hill, carrying down pieces of stone. Declarations of sins and punishment. Warnings.

News had come from east of the mountains over the years. First as gossip, then as facts: a man named Conway had accrued godly followers and called them his Apostles. He liked to send them to Diamond City and larger settlements to speak of the children that he claimed did the devil's work. Then, worse.

Let metahuman blood, whole settlements turned to ash.

Now it was said the Apostles could even track you down if you stayed still for too long. They could smell you, people said, the sin on your skin, reek of your nature. They'd butcher you for living and your parents for making you and your neighbors for giving you succor, whether they'd known your truth or not.

She wonders how many were like her once. One more time, she counts the bodies in the trees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me on Tumblr at allthezipofnukacola.tumblr.com!


	16. Moira

**October 19th, 2310 AD.**

Her mother always told her that you only take what you can carry. Doesn't matter where you're going, doesn't matter why—you gotta keep your hands as free and your spine as unburdened as you can.

"Were you scared?" she had asked when she was seven or so, sitting in her mother's lap as the woman wrestled her hair into twin braids, "When you had to leave home?"

"More scared than I'd ever been in my life."

"But you left anyway."

"Being scared doesn't mean you don't do what you have to."

"Do you wish you could go back?"

"I used to."

"But not anymore?"

"No."

"How come?"

Her mother had twined a rubber band around the end of Moira's second braid and kissed the top of her head. "Homesickness is heavy."

"What?"

"Being sad weighs you down. You gotta let go of what you can't change, otherwise you'll never get anywhere."

"Oh," she had said as if that had made any sense to her at all. More weird adult talk, she'd figured, the kind she could never puzzle out and thus discarded.

Only thing she had grasped was that Ma had been sad and now she wasn't; it hadn't seemed to matter how.

* * *

They leave the immolated settlement behind shortly after arriving, corpses left hanging, untouched, in the trees. Elise had tried to insist that it was a little bit wrong, wasn't it, just to leave them? Couldn't they at least take down the children? Give them some dignity?

"Here, or in the fire, or in the ground, dead is dead," Ahmya had said and Elise had flinched but stopped her protests, and the lot of them had headed back into the muddy field without another word.

They're back on the road now, fine mist of rain beginning to fall and a low-lying fog hugging the cracked pavement, swirling around their ankles as they trudge through it. The clouds are lightening as morning breaks and she's stopped bothering to wind up the flashlight, clipping it to a hook on her backpack. No one's saying anything and she guesses there isn't really much to talk about, anyway. Apostles had gone and done what scuttlebutt had long been saying they did: found a settlement they claimed had metahumans and destroyed it, root and stem.

No reason it should matter much to her, really. She hadn't known those folks and, sure, she wasn't keen on seeing kids swinging from the ends of nooses, but what can you do? Crying over corpses doesn't bring back the dead.

At the end of the day, you wrap up _your_ shit, you strap it to your back and you keep moving. Hell, she reasons, maybe those people are actually the lucky ones: they don't have to worry about anything anymore. Not like her—Aiden's back there, at the foot of the mountains, huddled under some half-assed tent with a bunch of other scabby-kneed kids. He's waiting on her to get back and show him that, maybe, things are going to be a little bit okay.

She tells herself to leave any grief for those kids behind in the fire, even though when the wind blows through the trees, it sounds like mourning, even when she thinks she can feel ghosts nipping at her heels.

* * *

The rain picks back up some time before noon, after they've spent hours marching down the road, which has only just begun to cut through a small town. The ruins around them are prewar, stripped down to their baseboards. Houses, shops, a town hall. Nothing left but some old buildings that are listing and hunched like they can feel their age.

"Rain," Elise says as if they're all too stupid to notice the fat drops that have started to splatter around them.

She's always doing shit like that: pointing out the obvious like she thinks she's being real observant or some shit. Truth is, Elise's clueless, even more so than her anemic cousin with his carefully buttoned dress shirt and meticulously shined Op armor.

Ma had always told her not to catch wise with an Operator, that they might seem too dainty to wipe their own asses, but that they've actually got killing streaks as wide as anybody's and scare a lot less easy than you'd think. But then, she thinks, it doesn't matter how many notches are carved into Mags and William Black's gun stocks—she knows neither Alex nor Elise have ever looked down the barrel of a gun and watched somebody die.

* * *

"Break?" Ahmya asks when the downpour worsens, though the way she says it sounds less like a question and more like a statement, and Moira rolls her eyes. Can't remember appointing this bitch leader.

No one objects, though, and they all duck into the shell of a Slocum Joe's, its windows blown out and insides gutted, nothing left but the lunch counter and some bare booths. She settles next to Ahmya behind the counter and the two of them start unpacking rations as Elise and Alex fret and towel off, and Rukmani kneels in the doorway to the kitchen. God, she hates the way that one moves. Soundless and fluid. Sets her teeth on edge. 

"Who needs shit heated?" Ahmya asks, but Moira's already popped off the lid of a can of mystery meat and started scooping it into her mouth with her fingers. Tastes like shit. Old and vinegary, with a yellow, gelatinous layer congealed on top, but food's food and she's pretty sure even tainted stuff can't do anything to her. Elise glances at her with a sniff, before passing over a can of soup; its label blisters and blackens beneath Ahmya's fingers, contents steaming.

"Careful," she says, sliding it back to Elise. "Hot."

"Right. Thanks."

Alex sits down across from Moira and fishes a paper bag of brahmin jerky out of his pack, before surprising her with her an awkward offering, holding out a couple pieces, eyes downcast. Instinct tells her to refuse it, to check his other hand for a jackknife aimed at her ribs, 'til she remembers who it is that's offering and, hell, even if he does stab her, what was that gonna do? Kill her?

She takes a strip, meat leathery between her fingers, and Elise frowns but offers not a word.

There's a lull of silence before Rukmani speaks, "How much longer?"

"I figured we'd see if the rain lets up, then-"

"No."

Ahmya blinks, glancing around at the others. "Uh... What?"

"How much longer until we turn back?"

"Suppose that'll be determined by how soon we find somewhere to hunker down."

"If we get much farther, we're not going to have any rations to make it back on."

Ahmya frowns, setting down her tin of beans. "We left the others to find somewhere to move them, or did you forget?"

"Plenty of space here."

"Plenty of collapsing houses with shit defenses here."

"Not much different from where we left them."

"We were supposed to find somewhere _better_," Elise cuts in. "I'm not dragging a bunch of kids here. It's not secure."

"I will," Rukmani says flatly. "If we keep moving ahead, we'll end up too far away to turn back, with no food. How long do you think they'll last if we die out here?"

"The point was to _not _go exploring with a bunch of moving targets," Ahmya mutters.

"So we don't. We know this road's empty. We go back, get them, then leave them here and explore ahead a few more days to find the next spot."

"There's Apostle activity here," Elise argues.

"A ways from the road. We get back here quick and they lay low while we're gone."

Ahmya holds up a hand. "We can make it another day going ahead and three going back on what we got. If we don't find anything better, _then_ we'll settle for this shithole."

The corner of Rukmani's lip quirks downward but she says nothing, settling back into silence, and Moira tries to remember if she'd ever heard the girl talk that much in one go before—nah, definitely not. Rukmani's voice is the kind that makes you remember every word she says. Low and glacial. So smooth, it's almost slippery. She sounds almost exactly like Nisha, honestly, and Moira almost wants to go along with whatever the freak says if it means she'll just go back to being quiet.

"Moira?" Ahmya asks, eyes flicking over to her. "Thoughts?"

She shrugs, but there's a needling in the pit of her stomach now. Aiden's dumb ass is probably chafing against all the waiting by now, watching the road and getting all sorts of stupid ideas in his head about chasing after them.

"Yeah, sure, one more day, then we head back."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me on Tumblr at allthezipofnukacola.tumblr.com!


	17. Lizzie

**Trigger Warning: Discussions of miscarriage and stillbirth.**

* * *

_"You can try to forget me but I won't let you easily,_  
_You can try to forget me but I won't let you easily,_  
_I'm floating out in the water, washed out to sea,_  
_Drifting away with time, you'll regret you conceived it._  
_Clean up the dead you leave behind._ _"_

\- Daughter, "Lifeforms"

* * *

**January. 2293 AD.**

Elise didn't have a name for two days.

Oh, there was a list, of course —dozens upon dozens of carefully selected options, all printed in perfect, alphabetical rows—but they had never been for her.

To pull them out of her nightstand's drawer, to dust them off, felt in its own way obscene, as if they had all before been claimed.

**March. 2291 AD.**

_ Audrey, Ava, Adelaide, Bridget, Catherine..._

On and on and on. She had obsessed over it for nigh on a week, after that backwater yokel of a doctor had, surprisingly, managed to operate a Brotherhood ultrasound and parse that the fetus was female.

_ Celia, Charlotte, Chloe, Dahlia, Eva..._

In the bottom drawer of her desk, tucked into the corner of the lab that the Overboss had so graciously ordered built for her in one of Nuka World's abandoned shops, were four manila folders. All had been numbered, stuffed full of fastidiously logged data and charts and observational journals, and all terminated with the same bright red, block letter stamp: FAILURE.

Different thicknesses, different data, same results.

_Flora, Genevieve, Gwen, Hannah, Hazel..._

The fifth folder was sitting upon her desk, open, the five written on its tab erased, blank slate waiting to be filled. Its contents were largely the same as the others—calendar, blood test results, growth chart, laminated sonograms—but its journal now sprawled for far longer. Fragmentary titles supplemented with detailed, carefully curated entries.

"April 29th, 2292: Fertilization and implantation confirmed."

"July 30th, 2292: First trimester complete. Risk of miscarriage significantly lowered."

"September 2nd, 2292: Fetal movement detected."

"September 29th, 2292: Female."

_Ivy, Lila, Lily, Lucy, Marlene..._

It wasn't logical. She knew that. She shouldn't think of names at all, nor faces nor futures. It just wasn't how you conducted yourself scientifically—all emotional investment did was cloud the objective and potentially skew results—but her brain had felt muddied as of late and, after a string of unsatisfactory conclusions, she found herself unintentionally clinging to the theoretical whenever her mind wandered.

And, besides, she argued with herself, wasn't it best to be prepared? Just in case? After all, in the end, there could be a...

_ Nanette, Olivia, Ophelia, Penelope, Rose..._

Besides, this one was already different. It had a presence—solid and persistent and undeniably _there_. Eighteen inches of fundal height (slightly behind the curve, but no matter; outliers had to happen somewhere). Approximately one hundred forty-five beats per minute (a little fast, but, again, it was so close to the average, so no matter, no matter). A sonogram with clear head and trunk and appendages, satisfactorily functioning organs (all small, but growth spurts were almost a given).

No, this one was different, she was quite sure of it. There was no harm in a little presumption with such steady progress. At eighteen weeks, she had already been detecting the tiny pops of nascent fetal movement for days. Quiet and infrequent, but one of the most penultimate milestones, she had thought; truly deserving of an entire journal entry.

_ Samantha, Scarlett, Stella, Vera, Victoria..._

Another week.

Two.

So little change, but no matter, no matter. It's all gradual, isn't it? And, sure, there are averages, but, again, some race ahead, some fall a little bit behind.

_Violet, Viola—_

With a _pop_ early one morning, came a flush of water, chased by blood.

* * *

Nisha had a baby. A daughter, if the rumors were true. Born a year or so prior, in the bowels of the Disciples' rancid mountain den and, heresofar, unseen by anyone outside of their little coven.

But she existed and that was punishment enough.

Lizzie had never courted sainthood and had no interest in starting, but there had always been lines even _she_ didn't cross, some shreds of decency even _she_ held onto, if only out of natural revulsion and a tiny voice somewhere, in the very back of her brain, that said, _"This will follow even you."_

Nisha had no such scruples. She was a disease, an infection that Gage had been stupid enough to transplant and feed, rather than lance or, at the very least, quarantine. She was every vile thing that had ever been dressed in the skin of a woman and, quite frankly, Lizzie was shocked her innards were anything but black and beset by rot, that they could create any kind of life.

A child, sewn with foul seed in foul soil, born in the dark to those who could never hope to deserve her.

But it didn't matter. None of it. Not at all. 

Because Nisha had a baby and she, an empty crib.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me on Tumblr at allthezipofnukacola.tumblr.com!


	18. Nisha

_"You hold your every breath_   
_but life is for the living in the water._   
_You feel that, you should run_   
_but where are you to hide_   
_in the water?_   
_Against the tide, we struggle_   
_with the skin we're in."_

_\- _Anadel, "In the Water"

* * *

**April. 2267 AD** **.**

Her early childhood was the smell of damp soil, rusty water and brahmin shit. It was days spent kneeling in the dirt, pulling up the fiddlenecks and creeping jennies trying to strangle her parents' crops, until her knees ached and her hands were raw. It was rising before dawn in their shitty, one room shack and trying to coax a meager bounty out of a starving land.

It was a long chain of tomorrows destined to be as miserable as the last, if they came at all.

* * *

Her father had been cursed with a farmer's fate, having been born to farmers himself. His parents had died in the old country, while he was still young, seized by tumors that had grown alongside the rice of their irradiated paddy fields. He would sit Nisha on his lap when she was small and tell the same story, over and over again: not a day after he had set their corpses adrift in the river, he had sold all but the clothes on his back and bought a cart ride to Maharashtra, where the last of the jowar grew. He had had enough of paddy fields, he would say, but farming had been all he had ever known.

Her mother was a weaver, or had been, before Nisha's father had passed through the ruins of Mumbai and won her over with promises of a life without worry or hunger. She had been an idiot, Nisha would later realize, made a bride by baseless promises that ended up having a shelf life of a scant few months, expiring when the jowar proved sparser than he'd been led to believe. Not even a year in and she had had to join him in the fields.

There had been another child. A boy. He'd died with the crops when radsoons swallowed the coast and rolled inland for an entire summer. Starving, her mother had had nothing to feed him.

Talk had begun among the local farmers soon after, of the boats that sometimes docked in the city between storms, repurposed old world ships held together by little more than scrap metal and a prayer. It had been said that they could cross the sea to a land free of radsoons and ghoul hordes and beasts like the vāgha that haunted the edges of settlements, orange and black and six-legged, bodies long as trucks.

Her parents had never been educated—neither could read more than a few words between them and both had had a habit of falling prey to superstition and high hopes—so they had boarded the next ship they could find on nothing but a rumor.

After two months at sea, they had anchored in D.C., where the water was poison and the monsters no better.

She had been born a year later, somewhere between there and the Commonwealth, delivered in the back of a brahmin cart and kept alive by sheer, dumb luck. But, as far as she could remember, life had only ever been that ratty patch of land on the southern edge of the Commonwealth, populated by a handful of scrawny settlers and a single machine gun turret.

Her father had always loved to tell her that the stories of her parents and their forefathers were etched into her bones, that there could be found some great meaning in their histories and endless hope in their survival.

"_Jaan hai toh jahan hai_," he had always said. "If there is life, there's the world."

She had believed him, for a time.

* * *

She was eight when Sledge came. The spring showers had been fortuitous as of late, promising a better crop than the previous growing season, when all they'd managed to claw out of the earth had been shrunken tatos, carrots and gourds.

Tasked with minding their four hens, she had, instead, sneaked off to her family's hut to lie on her stomach and play with her treasured collection of glass marbles. Some were opaque, others clear with whorls of color in their centers. Her father had found them once, when scavenging in the back of a burnt-out vehicle. They rolled along the uneven floorboards and clinked softly together and were, to her, the finest things in the whole world.

Her mother had cried when her father had returned, not a can of food in sight. Nisha had been too young to understand what she did now.

_ Clink, clink, clink_.

She had about five minutes before her mother noticed she was missing and came storming inside to drag her back to her chores.

_ Clink, clink, clink._

Maybe ten.

_ Clink, clink, cl—BOOM!_

A roar broke out like thunder that had touched down to Earth, shaking the settlement. Her marbles jumped and scattered and she clamored to her feet, throwing open the shack's door before freezing in the threshold.

The junk fence that bordered the southern half of the settlement was on fire. A great cloud of black smoke was billowing up into the sky and four of the settlement's five guards were racing towards it, guns cocked, shouting, as the farmers fled—scattering, she thought, like her marbles. She saw her mother running towards her, waving for her to go back inside.

"In, Nisha! _In!_"

But her legs didn't work, not right away. She just stared, gaping, as the smoke rose and a second boom split the afternoon in two, the fence splintering and flying apart as a grenade struck it. One of the guards screamed, flying backwards, and she saw a mist of red.

"_Nisha! Hide!_" Her mother wrenched her by the arm and hauled her inside. "Under the bed! And you don't leave until I come get you, understand? You stay _right_ there."

"But-"

"For once, just do as you're told."

"_Pita_-"

"He's gone to protect the crops. Now, _stay _and be _quiet._"

She shoved her to her knees and and Nisha scrambled underneath the bed skirt, her mother's feet vanishing as she raced back outside.

In the wake of the explosions came the rapid chatter of gunfire and shouting, screams, a dizzying crescendo until--

Silence.

She realized she was holding her breath, her neck stippled with sweat and heart spasming, and she shrank as far under the bed as the wall would allow her. Still, only silence. Deafening. More than anything, she suddenly wanted to sob and had to squeeze her hand over her mouth and wring shut her eyes to hold it all in.

For a long time, there was nothing; then, a harsh exchange of words on her parents' lopsided porch. Men's voices, gruff, using words her mother had always told her were rude and not allowed.

"_You've got five seconds to fuck off before I beat your head in._"

The door was wrenched open so hard that the hinges cried out and she sucked in a deep breath, wishing that she was smaller, so small that no one could ever, ever find her.

A pair of carpenter's boots stepped beside the bed. Their toes had been studded with the sharp ends of nails.

"Course there ain't dick here, neither," one of the men muttered, the other having seemingly taken heed and run off.

_Please, please, please, just-_

A knee. Then another. Leather pants with metal leg guards. A hand hiked up the skirt of the bed and a face, mottled with scars and old acne pockmarks, leaned into view.

"What the f-"

Her only route of escape blocked and adrenaline screaming—_because if her mother wasn't here, then, then—_her brain went fuzzy with panic and, all hope exhausted, Nisha let out the wail she'd been holding in and burst into tears.

"Whoa! Hey, fuck, don't- don't do that. It's fine."

He suddenly reached under the bed and grabbed her wrist, but he didn't squeeze, didn't yank.

"Come on," he said, softer than a man with a face like war had any right to speak. "It's okay."

His hands were rough but his hold was gentle and, though she didn't know it then, one day Nisha would realize that Sledge had, in that alone, shown weakness.

* * *

Fire had started to bleed from the guard posts, catching on one of her neighbor's wood shacks and swallowing it whole. It would catch on the brambles and patches of dead grass that littered the settlement and, sooner than later, she knew everything would be ashes. She was young, but she wasn't a fool; her parents had, at least, taught her that violence could make anything temporary.

There was a heap beside the fields, corpses thrown together like spare firewood, and Sledge, holding her hand, had gently tugged her past it.

"Nothing to see there."

A lie: there was the pale blue of her father's denim overalls, the red plaid of her mother's shirt. For a split second, she felt like she was being dangled above some giant pit, her feet kicking helplessly, before there came the drop, that telltale plunge of grief that she had never in her life had to know, that she would one day never allow herself to feel again.

She stopped dead in her tracks and let out a shrill wail, because her brain couldn't make all the pieces fit but what she had _hurt_, it hurt so badly she thought she was dying and, maybe, that wouldn't be so bad.

"Hey." He turned around and dropped to his knees, taking her by the shoulders. "Don't look over there, yeah?"

She tried to wrench away, sobbing, but he held fast. "Listen, this was- it was an accident, okay? It was never supposed to be like this. We tried to make a deal but your folks fired on us, understand? We didn't have no choice."

His voice shook and, unfamiliar with benders, she mistook the quiver in his voice caused by a Jet binge for a sign of sincerity. Still, she kept bawling, entire body wracked, and he squeezed her shoulders a little tighter.

"What's your name, huh? I'm Sledge."

"Ni-Nisha," she hiccuped, refusing to look at his face.

"Well, hey- listen, Nisha, what if I tell you I can make it up to you, huh? What if you come with me and I fix everything?"

Snot running down her chin, even as a child she had a shred of wisdom: "You can't."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me on Tumblr at allthezipofnukacola.tumblr.com!


	19. Sinead

She had belonged only to herself once, years ago. When she had been starving alongside her mother, crossing the ocean with her grandfather, there had only ever been her wearing her skin. Even when they'd landed on the Commonwealth's shore and worked their hands raw just to scrape by, even when the raiders had come and demanded more than half of what they owned as tribute, she had been her own.

_ I'm still mine_, she often told herself over the years, but, sometimes, it felt like a lie.

A price to pay for food, for security, for a life where her hands were not worked to the bone and the world did not clench her between its teeth.

It was a horrible fucking thought and she hated herself for it. That gut-splitting kind of hate that makes you want to hurt yourself any way you can. _Her children were not yolks—_

* * *

**2289 AD.**

She learned that reminding herself of truths did not make them seem any more real. Doubt was toxic that way. She laid awake on some nights and remembered why she had first tangled herself up with Mason: she had known what she wasn't. Much of her survival had been luck up until that point; she could barely fight and had never had the stomach for raids and guns and bloodletting.

She'd offered him what she could, as soon as she could, if only to earn her way into the Pack and live just a little longer. After that, she had reconciled with the fact that she would ultimately be a disappointment, finally forced to go on a raid and die in the crossfire, or fleeing in the night when his interest in her wore thin.

She hadn't expected him to keep lingering around.

Not a week after she'd first arrived, he had plopped down next to her by one of the camp fires out in front of Kiddie Kingdom and thrown back some shitty rotgut that someone probably brewed in a toilet. He had smelled like sweat and blood and his arm had kept bumping hers. He'd offered her a sip that she almost retched back up.

Other Packmates had given her looks like they were all in on some big, hilarious secret and she had briefly assumed they'd guessed her own plans, but in reality, they were hardly that perceptive. They had just assumed that she was hot for the Alpha, because who wouldn't be? Some of them, she would later learn, even grew a bit bitter about it all. Jealous, even.

He'd led her to a bridge not far from the Kingdom after that and held her against the eroding stone to fuck her. She'd bit his shoulder to keep quiet.

He must've liked what she gave him, she reasoned, because things had slowly started to shift. When people came to test their mettle—and usually lose their lives—in the massive Gauntlet the Disciples had built inside of the Bottling Plant, a sort of truce had been established so that members of all three gangs could freely come to cheer on the ensuing gore. He had started asking her to come with him, unaware that the violence turned her stomach, and had had her sit on a cushy, red chair right next to his own.

He wasn't a good man, but he was good to her. Made sure she had everything she could have ever needed and then some. Showered her in gifts and even bought one of the empty storefronts across from the Amphitheater just so she could have somewhere to tool about and sell her taxidermy. He had seen how she'd become lost in the gutting and wiring and preserving of the art and, one day, without warning, had made her close her eyes while he steered her across the walk to the shop. When she'd opened them, he had said, “It's for your stuffing and shit,” and she had seen that he was watching her intently, like a dog seeking praise, and realized there was no game of chess on his end, no greater plan.

He had given it to her just to make her happy.

She'd felt sick.

* * *

**2292 AD.**

For all the raider that she would never be, she learned to speak and hold herself like one. Crude and stubborn and firm enough to stand her ground, even to whip Pack pups into shape with a cutting line or two, until some called her, mostly jokingly, “Ma.”

Years in and she had never fully puzzled out what it was that anchored Mason to her and the mystery horrified her. _The end to whatever it is he likes about you could be coming crashing in at any moment and you won't know until it's too late._

She worked to keep herself useful, doing taxidermy and drawing in a not insignificant flow of caps and trade and cleaning the filth of the amphitheater. The latter was an undertaking not for the faint of heart, made easier only by the tapering of the population of Packmates to almost nil over the years, the bulk of them now occupying the Safari Zone, Kiddie Kingdom and a handful of western outposts. Soon, it was just her and Mason warming the backstage, the occasional random gang members sleeping outside on bald mattresses.

She offered a hefty chunk of caps to a trader named Shelby, who seemed to spend every waking moment of her life trembling and stuttering, in exchange for her assistance with cleaning the seemingly uncleanable. They picked up litter and animal waste, scrubbed the cages and bleachers and dog fighting ring with lard soap and hot water, used Abraxo and vinegar to disinfect every surface within reach. Most of the cages were uninstalled over time and taken to the parks with their respective beasts, and fly paper was strung up here and there until they grew heavy with rotting flies. Every mutt and cat that remained to mill about the Amphitheater was given a flea bath.

It took over a month before things were anywhere close to _clean_, Mason often watching her in between gang meetings and trips out into the West where he led raids, a look of bewilderment on his face.

"Just gonna get fucked up again," he kept saying.

"I'll skin you alive if it does," she snapped in return.

After Chip and the repair crew he'd come to oversee brought the backstage's staff kitchen and bathrooms back on line, she took to sitting on the floor of the shower room for as long as the tank's heater would allow, scrubbing herself under scalding water until her skin was pink and sore and the steam that gathered on the yellowed tiles and in the air felt vaguely like it was smothering her.

It felt good to be clean, to be alone, to barely be able to breathe.

* * *

“I got an idea,” he said one night, head pillowed on her breasts. They were sprawled out in the bed he had had built in one of the backstage's dressing rooms.

"Uh-oh."

"Real funny. Hear me out: shit's good, yeah?"

"All in all?"

"Mhm."

"Ay, seems alright."

"Right, so I been thinkin' about what comes next. You know, for me."

"Looking to retire?" she teased and he barked out a laugh.

"Fuck no. I'm lookin' to, uh, how do you say it? _Insure _what we got."

"Careful, too many big words and you might hurt yourself."

"You gonna hear me out, or keep bustin' my balls?"

"Go on, then."

"What've the other bosses got that I don't?"

"If you're thinking of taking the other parks-"

"Relax, that ain't it. What else they got?"

“Sticks up their arses?”

He snorted. "Yeah, but something else, too: heirs."

Her eyes snapped open. “What?”

"They all got brats."

"So?"

"If I die, what'll happen after?"

"Oh, come on-"

"I'm serious. Way shit is now, some snot-nosed punk'll come in once I kick it and run everything I built into the ground. But if I got somebody for down the line that I can, you know, _mold _into the perfect Alpha? Then that ain't gonna happen. Hell, it'd be good even for now--show people I got a plan."

"Looking to find some gutter rat to rear?" she joked, but all humor had left her. Her mouth was dry.

"Nah, I was thinkin' something a little closer to home."

"Mason,” she warned. “Don't."

He raised his head off of her chest and planted his hands on either side of her shoulders, staring down at her. "Don't what?"

"Don't ask what you're gonna ask."

His brow furrowed. "What'm I gonna ask?"

"I'm not a mother."

"Not yet—"

"And I'm never gonna be. I'm not made for it."

He snorted. "You're about the only one in this shithole who is."

"Based on _what?_"

"Who else keeps shit in order besides me? Keeps these idiots in line? Pups're scared of-"

She wrungher eyes shut and shook her head. "Discipline's not enough. Children need patience."

"You put up with me."

Her stomach was souring. "They need sacrifice. They need a home that isn't like _this._"

"There're other kids around."

"And who knows what they've seen?"

"Ain't no more bodies around the park. Overboss keeps shit cl—"

"There's a fucking dog fighting pit right outside these doors," she snapped.

"So?"

"It's not for children!"

"Saw that kind of shit my whole life and I turned out fine."

"Debatable."

He paused, frowning. "Fine, fuck it: we'll build a wall."

"What?"

"Wall between the pit and the front of the amphitheater. Kids won't have to see shit 'til they're older. How's that?"

"_Kids? _I'm not even agreeing to one."

"No! I mean—fuck, woman. I mean like… any of 'em."

"You know what you're askin' me? What I'd have to do with _my _body?"

"Sure, but—"

She shoved him off of her and rose from the bed, tugging on her clothes. “Go find some other bitch to get up the flue. I'm not the one.”

When she headed for the door, he stunned her with his silence.

* * *

It wasn't until she was alone, walking briskly through Nukatown and realizing with unease that she had nothing on her but a hunting knife, that she knew she'd made a mistake. Two Operators, leaning outside of the Parlor and smoking, eyed her as she passed.

It wasn't that she had, in those minutes, dug deep inside of herself and struck some hidden vein of maternal need, nor felt a pang of loss that swayed her (though she loved him, she supposed, in a way). It was simply logic.

He'd asked her to do something and she'd said no, told him to look elsewhere. And, stubborn bastard that he was, he would.

For almost three years, she had lived on far more than scraps by virtue of his fondness for her, and now he would find someone else. Her gut tightened and she felt the spot she had so desperately carved for herself near the top beginning to shrink out of reach.

He'd find someone else and they'd be bloody knuckled and blood forged; they'd lie on their back and give him an heir, then fall right back into the ranks from which they'd risen, one purpose replaced with another. And where would she be, then? Silly thing with little skill and a worn out welcome? Somewhere rotting at the bottom, if he let her stay at all.

She stopped beside the fountain and thought, _I did not weather seas to die so soon on the shore__._


	20. Ahmya

**October 20th, 2310 AD.**

Rukmani is gone before first light. Likely stole away during the throws of a fresh storm, when it was her turn to keep watch. Ahmya is the first to know, stirring after a particularly loud crash of thunder shakes through the diner. She is curled up in a corner, behind a booth, and wakes with the dregs of some strange, sour dream on her tongue (standing in an empty lot, lightning forking down into a distant, burning town, bodies hovering in the air). Her heart is racing and sweat has stippled her brow, and she stares at the cafe's pocked ceiling, trying to steady her breathing. When a pop of lightning whitens the room like the hot bulb of an old camera, she startles slightly and feels the tug of childhood—

—because she had been seven-years-old or close to it when she had first started to fear storms. If there had ever been a source for her fear, it didn't matter in the end: once the terror had planted itself deep in her chest, its fibrous roots threading through the trellis of her ribs, little could shake it loose.

One spring night, not long before her sister was born, she was wrenched awake by a clap of thunder that shook the Grille's walls. Her heart battered against her bones and she all but fell out of her bed, scrambling across the floor in the dark and tearing open her bedroom door. Her mother had tried to smother her anxiety (because, no, lightning won't set us on fire and yes, I promise, thunder isn't going to knock us off of the Mountain), but a child's fears didn't need oxygen to spread and, in the dark, Ahmya couldn't even remember anyone of her promises.

The inside of the Grille was pitch black and she maneuvered by memory out of her bedroom and past her brother's, through the back kitchen, the main room, the Grille's double doors. Rain was tattooing violently against the bulletproof glass—installed, her mother had once told her, not long before her birth—and the street lamps of the park below were little more than faint pulses of light, warping and shivering beneath the downpour. She steered towards her parent's bedroom, its platform enclosed in balsa wood walls, and hovered at the steps. Silent inside. Maybe she could be brave, maybe she could turn around and—another buckshot of thunder rang out and her gut tightened, tears pressing against the backs of her eyes.

She rapped hard against the splintered door to no reply. A second time and she heard a grunt and muffled swearing, followed by the creak of her parent's mattress. The door swung open to reveal her father, standing bleary-eyed and bare chested in the threshold, the room a dark smudge behind him. His single eye cleared slightly and narrowed.

"Yeah?"

She tried weakly to swallow her tears. "Thunder."

He screwed his eye shut and took a deep breath. "Can't hurt you, trouble."

"I wanna see Mom."

"Your ma needs sleep."

Her low lip wobbled and she looked at her feet.

"Oh, for fuck's sake, just... come here." He stepped around her, pulling the door shut behind him, and took her by the wrist to steer her towards the front of the Grille.

"I don't wa—"

"You ain't gotta do nothing but sit." He released her and turned the slumped, red couch that butted up against the front wall to face the window, before plopping down onto it. "Come on."

She hesitantly climbed to sit beside him but her skin felt tight, her nerves prickling as if they were conductors catching the static in the air. The next round of thunder made her jolt and clamor into his lap, burying her face against his chest. His skin was warm against her cheek and she could hear the even thump of his heart drowning out the flurry of hers. He rested his chin atop her head and rubbed her back.

As a fresh tide of thunder rolled through, clattering into her bones, she tensed, but he held her tight, keeping her anchored and her skeleton from flying apart. When it passed, he made her turn around to face the window.

"Don't shut your eyes."

Hesitantly, she obeyed.

"What d'ya figure the thunder's gonna do to you?"

"It _shakes_ us," she insisted, half convinced he'd lost his senses. "You can _feel_ it."

"This place's survived way worse than thunder. It ain't going nowhere."

She gnawed her lip but didn't reply. Arguing with her father, she had found, was a largely fruitless endeavor.

"That's it? That's all that's got you like this?"

"I don't know."

"If you're gonna be scared of shit, you oughta know why."

"Well, I don't," she snapped.

"If it can't kill you, ain't much point wasting your nerves on it, is all I'm saying."

She mulled that over but didn't answer. The floorboards behind them groaned with foreign weight and she turned her head to find her mother emerging from the murk and rounding the couch to sink down beside them.

"Storm watch?"

Her father grunted in reply and her mother hummed, arching her back and stretching her legs out in front of her, joints crackling like bang snaps. She had been pregnant, as far as Ahmya was concerned, for an eternity. Went from puking her guts out for weeks on end to rounding out dramatically in the belly with a sister that Ahmya envisioned as more alien than kin. Her mother glanced down to meet her gaze, reaching out a hand to stroke her cheek.

"Not much fun, huh?"

She shrugged.

"But look at you, not even crying."

She swallowed her readiness to admit that her tears had simply dried. No fresh ones, though; that much was, at least, the truth.

"I'm sorry."

"What for?"

She shrugged again. "Waking you up."

Her mother snorted and inched over to press against her father's side, his free arm coming to rest across her shoulders. "It wasn't you."

Her skin carried a tincture of homemade soap, a rumor of hubflower oil, and it smelled to Ahmya like home, like safety and tight holds and unspoken promises. The world was smaller then, insulated, the battering of the rain softened, the flaying of the wind robbed of its edge. Her mother guided her hand to the heavy swell of her belly and she found the surface to be in flux, the baby inside stretching furtively against her shrinking space. An errant limb lashed out, making her hand jump, before sinking back into the ether.

"Maybe she heard the thunder," she reasoned, staring nervously back out into the storm, and her mother tucked her head against her father's shoulder.

"Probably."

A tiny spark of panic flickered in her chest. "What if _she's_ scared?"

"She's fine, baby. She just likes to cause trouble."

As if in affirmation, her sister gave a dramatic roll, curling up beneath the overhang of her mother's ribs and inciting a hiss.

"Ribs?" her father asked as if it was routine, still staring ahead into the static of rain, arm slipping around her waist and hand giving her hip a squeeze.

"Ribs," she confirmed with a sigh. She sounded, then, as if she was more tired than she had ever been in her entire life, energy seeping out past her teeth with her crowded breath. Another roll and the baby dislodged herself, devolved into light kicks.

His hand slid to the side of her stomach, fanning out across the curved expanse and pressing down slightly to catch movement against his fingers. 

"Worst one yet, Boss," he murmured.

"No worse than this one was."

"Huh?" The next clap of thunder was more distant and she only startled slightly.

"You were a troublemaker," her mother said, reaching over to wind a strand of her hair around her finger—black and sleek with a slight wave, just like hers. "You used to move around so much, you kept me up all night."

"Looked like you were tryin' to get out."

Ahmya frowned. "I don't remember."

"Ain't nobody remembers before they were born," her father said, voice slightly slurred from exhaustion. "Don't suppose there's too much worth remembering anyhow."

The rain had begun to blur as her eyelids grew heavy, something almost like calm bleeding out of her mother and into her.

"It's probably boring," she agreed.

"You feeling better?" her mother asked softly and she nodded. "Good. Maybe next time, you can try and ride it out?"

"Can't come running to us every time there's a storm," her father said and, one day, she'd know it to be true. 

* * *

She frowns, scrubbing the heels of her hands over her eyes, and sits up with an ache in her spine to match the one in her head, reaching for her pack only to find empty air. She squints, eyes adjusting, and finds it to be a good foot away from where she left it, flap hanging open. She crawls over to it, hackles raising, and notices that the spot where Rukmani had set up camp is now vacant.

_Fuck me_.

She stands, casing the room, and finds everyone else exactly where she'd left them: Alex and Elise lying side-by-side behind the counter, Moira snoring softly in the supply closet.

_Just fuck me straight._

Her pack is relatively full, short only a second canister of water and two cans of Vienna sausages that Rukmani apparently saw fit to lift. Still, she wants to rage. Wants to kick at the booths and spit and swear to wake the dead, but the fact is the storm is heavy and the hour is early and Rukmani's likely long on her way.

So she swallows her temper and, instead, sits down to wait for the storm to pass, staring into the darkness, silhouettes of the decaying township illuminated with each flash of lightning. No point in waking the others for nothing, she tells herself, even as her temperature raises and the air around her boils. Not like there's anything any of them can do but sit tight, clothes they've got ill-suited for a long trip in a bad storm.

But fuck her, she's _never_ liked Rukmani—honestly, she can comfortably say she'd give a good handful of caps just to not be in the same room with the freak—but without her, the Disciples aren't exactly going to fall in line and, like it or not, they need the numbers.

She's never journeyed far outside of Nuka World before, but anyone with half a brain knows that small groups in the Commonwealth, metahuman or not, are ripe fruit for bad luck and foul play. 

When a particularly cruel burst of light floods the street, she thinks, "Dumbass," and when she glances back at her pack, she thinks, "Fucking cunt."


	21. Griffin

**October 20th, 2310 AD.**

Someone had to watch them, so he stayed behind.

He figures he has about as much credibility as a leader as the next schmuck, but he's one of the oldest and, according to Ahmya, "at least you know your ass from your elbow." That and, as he had realized when the scouting group was shrinking out of sight and he had turned back to see clusters of Pack, Operator and Disciple kids sizing each other up, he had no specific loyalties. "Unaffiliated," folks like him got called back in Nuka World, more as an insult than anything—_why don't you just man up and pick a side?—_but here it meant a hand more made to calm the waters. He couldn't rightly be accused of favoritism without a flag to stand under.

It hadn't been so bad in the beginning. At first, everyone had mostly listened, if only because there was nothing else to do. They'd taken shelter under the wreckage of a half-collapsed belt of highway, its rubble providing a solid wall for well on a mile and the overhanging concrete fending off the rain and sunlight. Some had pitched proper tents. Others had just climbed into sleeping bags under plastic tarps. In every case, folks had stuck to their own, gangs spaced warily away from each other, members occasionally glowering at each other across the distance.

They were as safe as they could be, he figured, and, prior to their flight, each gang had managed to discretely collect enough rations to keep them going for a long time to come. Before they left, the heads of the gangs, if you could call them that, had even appointed stash guards to dole out equal shares among their own (no exchanges between the groups, Ahmya had warned, not even as a so-called trade, unless he wanted folks to find reasons to go for each other's throats).

The first few days, the younger kids had mostly just putzed around, tasked with washing pans, counting inventory and mending random tears and loose boot heels, while the older ones took turns walking a rough perimeter, perching on rubble to watch the wastes and maintaining the guns. Every night, four fires had sparked to life and those barely out of childhood had sat around them, smoking, drinking and bullshitting as those still in grasp fell asleep slumped against each other.

He had taken to floating between the camp fires, guaging the mood, picking up any would-be quarrels or ripening rumors. For two days, there was nothing much of note. Two Pack members, neither older than fifteen, had tried to climb a toppled beam, fallen off and bruised themselves into knowing better. A Operator girl with ginger hair and the power to replicate sound had started scaring people shitless by hiding behind rubble and mimicking deathclaw grunts until he had told her to cut the shit. Some unaffiliated girl had tried to steal an extra pack of snack cakes. Minor shit. Nothing even worth writing down.

And sure, when it got late, some of the youngest would whimper over the parents they had left behind and the strangeness of the world, and he'd occasionally catch older folks staring listlessly back West, but it was better than anyone hatching a mutiny or making a break for it. _There's no going back _a Disciple had said as they'd slipped out through a portal Rukmani had torn, and those words had bubbled like crude oil through the gangs.

There's no going back, because if you do, you'll have to tell the gangs why everyone ran, where everyone went, and once word gets out, Nuka World's as good as razed.

There's no going back and all you've got is what you can carry.

* * *

He wonders now if he got too complacent, if the first few days of bland stability had tricked him into forgetting one of the biggest threats to raider peace: boredom. By the third day of nothingness—no word from the scouting party, no plan, no long running distractions—he had noticed idle brains wandering and tensions ratcheting up. A Pack girl had mocked an Operator for whining about the rain. A Disciple had accused an unaffiliated of lifting a bottle of Nuka Cherry from her rucksack. Two Operators had started doing target practice with pebbles using the back of a Disciple boy's helmet.

He had jumped in before anything ever got bad—_hey, hey, fucking relax, will you?—_and reminded folks that he was keeping a record of everything that happened for when the leaders returned, something that continually cowed Pack members and sent Disciples scrambling, but did little for the ever-bored Operators, who, he suspected, had little regard for Elise and Alex without their parents in range.

"Come on. They'll be back soon. Just be cool."

He supposes he should've expected a Disciple to be the trigger for the first real fight. The Operators are proud and the Pack tend to have short fuses, but it's almost always the Disciples that bite faster than a cornered radrat the minute they get the chance. Their first day on the road, he and Ahmya had walked slightly ahead of the others and she had flatly said that, as far as she was concerned, the Disciples weren't much different from feral cats someone had starved and strapped knives to, and now, with two leering at him, he's not entirely sure she was wrong.

It's bullshit, this little stand off. All started because an Operator boy had had the _audacity_ to step backwards while talking to a friend and accidentally bump into a Disciple girl on her way back from guard duty. It had been the kind of tiny thing a normal person would forget about within five minutes, but no one seems to have taught these assholes how to say "excuse me" or "I'm sorry," so, naturally, the girl shoved the Operator, telling him to watch where the fuck he was going, and he'd grimaced, demanding she not touch him.

Now, he can feel any peace he's kept going quickly starting to curdle.

"Aww, I'm sorry, did I get the shirt mommy ironed for you dirty?"

"Fuck off."

"What are you gonna do now, nobody to wash your clothes?"

"I said _fuck off_," the Operator snaps and she grins.

"Or what?"

"Watch out, Cheri," another Disciple says, loping up and resting her chin on the girl's shoulder. "You don't wanna make him run home."

"Okay, that's enough," he thinks, setting down a pocket knife he'd been idly twirling and marching over to quell whatever shit they're trying to stir.

"Knock it off, guys."

"Or what?"

He looks the girls up and down. The troublemaker's short, chubby and pale, her mask a metal dome that swallows her entire head, jagged grates cut over her eyes and mouth. The interloper isn't much taller, but scrawny and hazel-skinned, a brown cowl wrapped around her head and metal visor covering her upper face, its pointed bottom making her look a bit like an eyeless owl. "Cheri, right? And you're?"

"The fuck do you care?"

"Listen, you can make it easier and tell me your name, or I can just describe you to Rukmani when she gets back."

The owl girl stiffens slightly, cracked lips pursing. "Nightshade."

"Right, great. Wanna explain what the problem is or what?"

"Fucker cut me off, " Cheri mutters.

He turns to the Operator boy, a ruddy kid with a portwine stain over his left eye and dishwater blond hair. Probably no older than seventeen. His gray dress shirt is oddly well-kept, all things considered, tucked carefully into his slacks. "What's your name?"

"Beckett."

"Did you mean to cut Cheri here off?"

"I didn't even see the bitch-"

"Fuck you-"

Griffin waves his hand, trying to pretend like sweat isn't forming a sheet on the back of his neck. He wishes that he'd given the bosses homework before those assholes had left, had them write up a list of what it was everyone could fucking do, because it's now occurred to him that he could have just put himself between two primed warheads without even realizing it. "Wanna try that again?"

Beckett's frown etches itself deeper into his face. "I didn't even see _her._"

"Okay, then watch where you're going. And you," he glances back at Cheri. "_Relax_."

There's a long moment of rigid silence, before the girls turn to head off and Beckett does the same, and he's afforded a brief second to believe he's just stopped them all from careening off a cliff, when Cheri stutters to a stop, spins on her heel and hocks the mother of all loogies. It sails a quite frankly impressive distance before splattering on the back of Beckett's leather backpack. An insult, surely, especially when it comes to the fastidiously clean Operators, and he's even prepared to mention it to Rukmani, whatever good that'll do, but just that. Nothing more. Beckett, he realizes, hasn't even noticed.

_ Okay, sure. Good deal. Hope that made you feel better._ He wipes his sweaty hands on his jeans, turning to return to his alcove and tune the crooked-neck guitar his father had gifted him, when he sees white vapor twisting off of Beckett's pack.

"Hey-"

The wet leather starts to hiss and bubble, before rapidly disintegrating, two cans of Cram spilling out of the widening hole, their metal almost entirely dissolved by the time they hit the dirt, sour meat splattering against Becket's heels.

"Dude, fuck!" Griffin lurches forward, grabbing ahold of Beckett's straps and yanking at them.

"What the fuck, man-"

"Get it off, it's burning!"

The boy freezes, letting Griffin wrench the pack off and toss it to the ground a good foot away from them, its contents springing free and scattering in the dirt. The Cram cans, it seems, took the brunt of it, the corner of a nearby Grognak comic only somewhat melted.

"Hey, what the fuck?" Griffin shouts.

Cheri stops, only half-turning to face him. Her voice is syrupy. "What?"

"Did you just spit _acid_ at him?"

He's got a real grating feeling that, if he could see her eyes, he'd be watching her batting her lashes. "Just a little."

"You tried to kill him because he _bumped into you?_" Beckett is staying oddly silent, already pasty skin further blanched, as if he's just sorted out that his spine had only just been moments away from dissolving.

"Oh, please, it wouldn't've reached him."

"Yeah? You know that?"

"Yeah, sure," she says flippantly.

"F-fuck you!" Beckett manages and Griffin glances back at him when he hears an sharp crackling. Ice has started to harden on the kid's fists, jagged shards cropping out like stalagtites, and he thinks, _Please tell me you can't throw those_. "I'll-"

_"What am I supposed to do when these jackasses start swinging at each other?" he'd demanded as Moira crammed rations into her duffel bag._

_ She'd grinned at him, wild bramble of red hair curling this way and that. "Put 'em in time out_."

He doesn't let Beckett finish, just stomps his left foot on the chalky, red earth and thinks _block, _a prickly current surging down his tensed leg, tailed by the sensation of _something_ streaming out through his pores. The wall that forms is a bit like the shimmer of heat on a horizon line: clear, almost missable were it not for the waver of refracting light. It's a sloppy square not much taller or wider than Beckett and, if he were to punch it, he'd probably bruise his knuckles.

"She-"

A group of Pack kids is gathering at a distance, eying the scene, some nudging each other and whispering, and Cheri is marching back, Nightshade on her heels like a dog scenting blood. He's suddenly acutely aware that there's nothing between _him_ and an acid loogie when another Disciple rounds one of the highway's severed legs. It's him, the one who had said it first—_there's no going back—_tall and with corded muscles, freckled arms and a mask painted in shiny, black veneer, its only features two eye holes and a jagged mouth slit. A few Disciples cluster behind the rubble, craning to see. 

He jogs over, coming to a messy stop next to the girls. "What's going on?"

"_Your_ girl here just spit acid at him just because he cut her off."

"He called me a bitch!"

The Disciple folds his arms, studies Griffin for a minute, before turning to Cheri. "If you can't handle name calling, maybe you can't handle guard duty."

"That's bullshit."

"Go back to camp. Chang can take over your shift tomorrow. You can watch the kids."

Cheri bristles, glaring at Griffin, before storming off, and Nightshade shoots him what he guesses is a dirty look before following suit. He turns back to Beckett to find the tawny skinned Operator girl that Elise had named their rations guard bringing up the kid's rear. Tori, her name was. Whenever he'd dropped by the Operators' campfire, she had taken to bitching at him about shit he couldn't solve, like the weather and ticks and how loud the Pack fucking got.

"I expect we'll be compensated," she says stiffly. "That cost us two Cram and a backpack."

The Disciple rubs the back of his neck, surveying the mess, before squatting to gather the goods and hold them out to Beckett. The kid snatches them back as if expecting some sort of trick. "Sorry... I'll have someone run two cans over to you. And Dag's good at sewing. She can patch your bag."

"I can do it myself," Becketter murmurs, picking up his backpack and hurrying away. Embarrassed, Griffin realizes, that someone from his gang knows he let a Disciple get the jump on him.

"It won't happen again," the Disciple offers weakly and Tori sniffs.

"We'll see." She's gone as quickly and quietly as she came and then it's just the two of them, uneasily standing there under the hazy autumn sun. He relaxes his leg and the field he almost forgot he was holding blinks out of existence. The rubberneckers, disappointed by the lack of carnage, disperse, muttering.

"Sorry, again."

"Hey, yeah, no big deal. You diffused things."

"Sure, but listen," the Disciples glances over his shoulder to make sure everyone is out of range, "Rukmani doesn't need to know about this, yeah?"

"If I don't tell her, Tori will."

"Who?"

He gestures back to where Tori was standing. "Miss Personality."

"Can't you just tell her she's exaggerating?"

"Does it really matter? Rukmani's not going to have your head just because somebody else acted out of pocket."

"It's not-" He rubs the back of his neck again. A nervous habit, maybe. "She's caused some trouble with our own, too, so Rukmani might... Look, it's just not really Cheri's fault, okay? That's all I'm saying. She'll do better. I'll talk to her."

In truth, he doubts Rukmani will give much of a shit either way, but the guy, for all his size, seems easily rattled and he relents. "Yeah, sure, okay. I won't mention it unless Tori does."

"Thanks." He shifts, looking away, as if searching for something else to say. "Her mom died a week before we left. It's just a lot, you know?"

Griffin nods awkwardly, feeling as if he's just been saddled with something obscene. "Yeah, uh... Sure, I got you."

"I'm Whit, by the way." He extends a hesitant hand and Griffin blinks at him, glancing at his other hand in search of a knife that isn't there.

"Are you from Nuka World?"

"Huh?"

"Sorry, I just mean, were you born there?"

"Yeah, but what does that have to do with anything?"

_ Because you talk about dead mothers like they mean something. Because I don't think I've ever shaken someone's hand before. _

But he says nothing, just takes Whit's hand and finds it calloused, likely toughened by gun care or armor work. There's a chunk missing from the tip of his thumb and a lopsided stick-and-poke tattoo of barbed wire is branded over his inner wrist.

"I'm Griffin," he says dumbly.

"Yeah, I know."

"Right."

He withdraws. "Well, anyway, thanks again. I'll see you around, I guess."

"Yeah." It suddenly feels like there's a stopper in his throat. "I might stop by the Disciples fire tonight."

"Yeah, all right." Whit stands there for one beat more, before departing with a nod, and Griffin pulse shudders and climbs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me on Tumblr at allthezipofnukacola.tumblr.com!


	22. Alexander

"_The child I was_  
_is just one breath away from me_."  
— Sheniz Janmohamed 

* * *

**October 20th, 2310 AD.**

They're back on the road, chasing the tail end of a storm, when Elise turns eighteen. He checks the scrap of paper he keeps in his back pocket to tally the days and the watch his mother had given him less than a year before.

Elise was born at 7:14 AM, a fact kept fresh in his mind because her mother was always fastidious in her record-keeping and obsessive in her rituals. Every year, without fail, she had woken Elise at 7:14 sharp with a slice of cake and almost desperate smothering of affection, as if to remind both of them that Elise was simply _there_.

When he was seven, he had chafed slightly over the fact that no such tradition had been built around him, and, always one fond for details, he had asked his mother, one morning, when he had been born. She had been sitting at her vanity table, stenciling on some eyeliner with a roller in her hair and he'd softly clapped his hands to announce his arrival.

"What?" The glance she'd cast him in the mirror had been brief.

_ When was I born?_

"What?"

_When was I born?_

"Is this some kind of test?"

_No._

She'd paused and set the pencil down, casing him as if in search of a head injury. "December twelfth. You know that."

_No, what time? Like on the clock._

"Why?"

He'd shrugged. _Elise knows when she was born._

His mother had blinked as if it had never occurred to her that, one day, he would realize his birthday indicated a beginning, that he had, at some point, not existed at all.

"Well..." She'd trailed off, glimpsing the miniature, cloudy-faced grandfather clock in the corner of her room. "You were born at night."

_Do you not remember__?_ There had been a sinking feeling in his gut, like his innards had violently pitched downward.

If anyone had perfected the art of the poker face, it had been his mother. She'd worked on it since long before his birth; maybe, her whole life. Her face had stayed smooth as an untroubled lake. Lips pursed firmly—but not _too_ firmly so as to show stress—and eyes alert and intelligent but unyielding. She saw every fiber that made you, could unravel them as she so pleased, but you would never know if it was because you had rattled her or she'd simply liked to make you squirm.

For once, her brows had knitted together instead.

"I wasn't exactly watching the clock."

_When were _you _born?_

"I have no idea."

_Oh._ He'd deflated slightly.

"It's not something most people care about, Alexander."

_Why not?_

"A lack of clocks, for one."

_People don't have clocks?_

"Some people don't even have food."

He had startled slightly. _Oh, right._

Her face had softened, if only slightly. "If it means that much to you, go ask the doctor. I'm sure she has it in your file."

_Does Dad know?_

"He was away on a job when you were born."

_What about Aunt Lizzie__?_

She had turned back to the mirror to apply a pale pink lipstick. "She might."

_Do you want to know?_

"How about this: I'll wait right here so, when you find out, you can run back and tell me."

11:25 PM.

He had been born a month early at 11:25 PM.

* * *

He nudges Elise as the group silently retraces their steps, mood overwhelmingly soured by what Moira had referred to as Rukmani's "massive cuntery," and she glances at him. The rain has ebbed away, yielding to a silent, slate sky, and the neighborhood smells of molding leaves and swollen wood. Crows, tucked under the eaves of half-standing homes, scream at them as they pass.

"What?"

_Happy birthday._

Her almond eyes widen slightly. "Huh?"

He taps a nail against the face of his watch. _Happy birthday_.

"It's the twentieth?"

He nods. Ahmya is trailing behind them, glancing periodically over her shoulder in anticipation of some threat that has yet to arrive. If she overhears them, he doubts she cares at all. Moira is walking slightly ahead, oscillating between dragging her garish, purple baseball bat along the ground and twirling it in the air, likely put out by the continued lack of action. She's got her hair twisted into two sloppy braids and, when she walks, her full hips swing in a way that, he thinks, is maybe kind of nice.

"Happy birthday to me," Elise mutters, stepping over a brackish puddle. "Just how I wanted to spend it."

_We can do something once we're back at camp_.

"Oh, yeah, because I'm sure we'll get there and Rukmani won't have caused any problems at all."

He doesn't know how to respond to that. In truth, he isn't even sure what they'd do if Rukmani _hadn't_ absconded—Elise has no taste for liquor and she's left all the finery she prefers behind with her parents and better sense. He sinks back into silence, wondering if, perhaps, he should have simply let the day slide by and left some memories unturned.

She adjusts her rifle on her back and glances at him, forehead wrinkling like she already knows exactly what he's thinking. "Sorry. I really do appreciate it."

_No, no, it's okay_.

"No, I mean it. You didn't have to remember. Thanks."

_You're welcome_.

Elise's smile is watery, but it's more than anything she's offered in days and he'll take what he can get. He tries to return the gesture and, instead, stumbles directly into a suddenly frozen Moira. The top clip of her rucksack clanks against the silver metal of his chest plate and he flounders slightly, righting himself and stepping back.

"Good to know you're watching my back so good, Black," she snorts, totally unmoved by the impact, and a strange warmth takes up residence in his stomach.

"Why'd you stop?" Elise demands, frowning.

"Check it out." Moira lifts her bat, gesturing towards an alleyway littered with fallen leaves and upturned trash cans. Sprawled on top of each other, throats cleanly split and entrails snaking out of their gashed stomachs, are two feral mutts. Their tongues are hanging dumbly, eyes staring at nothing. "Our girl passed through here."

"No shit. She's going back to camp."

"We didn't know that for sure."

"Congratulations, you're a detective. Can we keep going now?"

"Yeah, sure, wouldn't wanna hold you up, princess," Moira snaps, moving ahead, and Elise rolls her eyes at him when he puts a placating hand on her shoulder.

_She was just trying to help_.

"I don't want to stand around talking in the open."

Alex glances back at Ahmya, who's trudging along with her eyes trained on the alleyway.

_ You don't have to be a know-it-all_.

"Really?" she demands. "Thanks. On my birthday, too."

_You didn't even remember it was your birthday until I told you_.

"I wasn't exactly thinking about what day it was."

_I'm just saying not everything has to be an argument_.

"Which you're proving with an argument."

_I'm not trying to._

"If y'all are gonna bicker, hang back so I don't have to hear it," Ahmya mutters.

Elise sniffs but quiets all the same and, unsure of what to say, he unshoulders his sniper rifle, shifting the weight in his hands and giving it its third once-over of the day. There's a fleck of dust on the barrel that he swipes away with his sleeve, but it is otherwise just as pristine as ever. Black, sleek and well-oiled. Wood hand guard polished. Every single component slotted perfectly into place. It had been his father's once, some odd years ago.

He likes guns.

Likes the rhythm and ritual of breaking them down, of cleaning and oiling and reconstructing them amidst the sharp tang of gun grease, of memorizing their specs and ammunition and munitions. But most of all, he loves submerging himself in the quiet just before a shot, clocking distance and wind and the curve of the horizon; then, the satisfying sink of the trigger, the burst of a struck target board or molerat.

When he was younger, he had hated them. The deafening crack of a rifle had sent him scrambling and the ugliness of a killing thing had made his chest ache. Twice his mother had tried to instruct him on gun usage and twice she had come away frustrated and bitter. The second time, when he had been about ten, he had tearily apologized for being too afraid to pull the trigger of a pistol and she had flatly told him that those who hesitated led short lives.

It was his father who had understood, who had showed him how to take apart the things that scared him and make from their pieces something easy to control.

In the spring of his eleventh year, he had been sitting at the Parlor's long table and solving algebra equations from a mildewed textbook—another thing he'd so loved; the honesty of numbers, the consistency of a equation every time you got it right—when his father had sat across from him and, without ceremony, set a rifle down on the lacquered tabletop with a clack. He'd stiffened.

"Your mother, she is telling me that you won't go shooting with her."

He had looked down, nodding sullenly.

"It's a scary thing, yeah?"

_I dunno._

"It is. See, I say to your mother, 'It is _good_ he's scared. Means he understands the power of a gun.'"

He had glanced up, somewhat hopeful, and found his father smiling down at him. He had been a handsome man, with perfectly coiffed, blond hair and a face that the Old World magazines would have called chiseled, and whenever he had smiled, it had always had a sincereness that reached his blue eyes. To be on the receiving end of his father's approval was to be warmed to the core.

"I give you this gun, what do you do?"

_Don't touch it._

"Now, sure. But one day, you will be needing to pick up a gun and then what?"

_You check to see if it's loaded?_

"Yes! And then what?"

Alex had shrugged, breaking eye contact, but he had felt it again, the wheedling pressure of an expectation he didn't fully understand.

His father's smile had wavered slightly, tinge of concern clouding his eyes. "Älskling, how do you make something less scary?"

_Break it?_

"Sometimes, yes, but what if you need it?" He had gestured at his textbook. "What do you with a very long problem, lots of parts?"

_Take it apart?_

His father's grin had returned and he had begun to unscrew the rifle's barrel. "Sometimes, all you need to do to not be afraid is understand."

* * *

_I'm sorry_, he signs after a lull, the only sound the trudge of their boots across eroded pavement.

Elise gnaws her lip, before conceding. "Me, too."

Another break of silence, before she forgoes the spoken word and rapidly signs, _But why do you want me to be polite to her?_

_What?_

_Why do you care if I'm nice to Moira?_

_Fighting won't improve anything._

He doesn't expect what abruptly follows, the sharp flicks of Elise's wrists and jabs of her fingers no different than the lashing of her tongue. _I've seen you looking at her._

Heat surges up the back of his neck and he's too slow to stop the merging of his brows and parting of his lips. Nineteen years in the care of his mother and he's never learned the secret workings of a raider boss's face.

_I don't._

_You offered her _food_ yesterday and you keep looking at her ass and you tell me to play nice—_

_No, I don't!_

_She won't fuck you._

He stiffens, stomach knotting, and in the encroaching daylight, murky though it is from the lurking clouds, Moira's deep red hair gleams like something from another time._ I don't want her to._

_ She won't love you, either._

He should keep his steps even and shrug it off, as his mother would have, because _of course_ Moira won't and it wouldn't matter even if she did, but, instead, he can feel his cheeks reddening and speeds up, falling into step beside Moira, who's working an old stick of gum between her teeth.

She gives him a sarcastic, lopsided grin, blowing a pale pink bubble. "What's the matter, Black? Looking for better company?"


	23. Aiko

_"I had a thought, dear,  
_ _however scary  
_ _about that night,  
_ _the bugs and the dirt.  
_ _Why were you digging?  
_ _What did you bury  
_ _before those hands pulled me  
_ _from the earth?_

_I will not ask you where you came from,  
_ _I will not ask you, neither should you.  
_ _Honey, just put your sweet lips on my lips.  
_ _We should just kiss like real people do."_

\- Hozier, "Like Real People Do"

* * *

She had thought, one day, she'd outrun her past and failed futures. She'd shake herself loose and get so far away she wouldn't even remember what it had all looked like. It had been an easy promise to make; an impossible one to keep.

_ Bright flash of light, rumble of detonation, upheaval of debris._

A child's hope, she thought now. Nobody's legs can hold out long enough for them to leave everything they had once been in the dust. It was why people used to empty their pockets just so therapists could pick through their brains and try to set things right. It was why, when Hideko came back from Anchorage, he had kept waking up screaming in the night no matter how many months passed.

_ Cold steel of the vault, her mother's weeping, the cryopad door slamming shut._

It wasn't just the past that could sting. The things she had wanted, the things she had slated as sure-fire guarantees, had grown warped and ugly in hindsight. A changed course and suddenly her plans of a shiny law degree, a white picket fence, a perfect spouse, two-point-five kids were like the burns of a cigarette someone had put out on her skin after she'd lost a fight she'd thought she could win.

_ Blare of the warning alarms, frost on her eyelashes, dead faces of her mother, her father, her brother, her neighbors._

Her adrenaline had fired off and she'd let it carry her to the surface, where she'd look out over a dead world and vomited on the dusty hill that overlooked Sanctuary Hills. Her brain had been a dizzy mess as she'd looted her neighbors' homes for cans of beans and vacuum sealed packets of potato chips, and drank water from a cloudy stream that had made her retch. Barely a thought had formed beyond _stay alive stay alive_ as she'd popped the Radaway she'd looted from the Overseer's medicine chest and retrieved her father's 10mm pistol from his gun safe. It wasn't until a storm had rolled in and the clouds had turned greenish that she'd climbed into her parents' root cellar and wept and screamed herself to sleep.

When she'd awoken, she'd wrapped her hands around her lost future's throat and tried to strangle it.

She spent a week alone before a woman with a blistered, two-headed cow had passed just beyond the bridge and taken her along. "Better two pairs of eyes on the road than one," she'd said, but Aiko had known the truth was that she had gotten lucky and found someone to pity her. Her father had taught her how to shoot and taken her hunting on trips up north and, when a pack of frothing molerats had burst out of their burrows, she'd shot the heads off two of them. THe woman, Riley, caved in the heads of the rest with a tire iron.

"You oughtn't waste bullets on just molerats."

She had bit her tongue and refrained from asking what could be worse out there than those.

_ Back spines of a deathclaw cutting through the distant horizon line, ferals lit up by molotov cocktails, men strung up from trees by their guts._

The world was scabby and sick and she had drifted through it with a dull beating in her head that had made her want to lie down and never get up. Riley had handed her a sack of a few hundred caps and when she'd tried to refuse it, the woman had simply said, "My daughter would'a been about your age by now," and left her outside of the Dugout Inn. Aiko had managed to stay there for a week, subsisting off of noodles and listlessly drifting through town, until the dreams of her family had crept into her waking hours and she hadn't been able to stop sobbing for want of a future she'd never, ever have.

She had thought she'd wrung the life from her dreams, but her hands had failed her then. 

So she tried to outrun what she couldn't kill, taking up with a scavenging team headed west on a lark, chasing after rumors that there was something worth finding in Nuka World, and falling into the jaws of the Gunners who had overrun the station. Beforehand, it had sounded like something to do; maybe, a way to die.

She'd lived because she'd hidden in the burnt out husk of an old car (because she was a coward) and when the surviving Gunners had regrouped, she had slinked into the train station and, dumb with guilt, fallen hook, line and sinker for the raiders' bait.

_ Rancid stink of the Gauntlet, bleed of the poison gas, electric crackle of Colter's power armor._

_ And a man, a man on the other end of an intercom promising her her life._

* * *

**January. 2289 AD.**

Gage had nightmares. Sometimes, in his sleep, he'd twitch and mutter; occasionally, he'd startle awake, his one eye swinging around the room in search of some threat that wasn't there. She'd tried to ask him about it once, but his jaw had locked up and he'd told her it didn't matter, past was the past. She'd let it go, even when she finally shared her nightmares with him.

He was flinching slightly now, his back to her as he laid on his side and murmured half-words. She shivered. Winter had come early and fiercely to the Commonwealth, slamming Nuka World with snowstorm after snowstorm, hardening the ground with frost and encasing the rides in icicles. Gage had thought himself subtle lately, hovering a little closer to her than usual as she waddled over slick paths, as if he was convinced she might trip and require rescue at any moment.

Now, three thick blankets and she was still freezing. Convenient that her hot flashes were always nowehere to be found when she could use a dose of warmth. She inched closer to Gage, curling against his back as closely as she could and pressing her cheek between his shoulder blades. He was warm to the touch and sweating slightly but whatever was dogging him in his sleep seemed to have abated. It wouldn't have mattered much either way; she could barely sleep anymore.

She squeezed her eyes shut, slinging her arm over his side, and tried to take as deep a breath as she could with her lungs crushed like soda cans in her chest.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. None of it. Sometimes, she thought this was all fate's elaborate joke at her expense: she could keep one piece of the future she had so meticulously planned, but only that which was worst suited for the world. There were no bar exams left to pass, no squeaky clean suburbia with whitewashed fronts and perfect box hedges to inhabit, no upstanding fellow civil rights lawyer to sweep her off her feet. Just an empire built on blood and unsteady ground and a noisome war creeping closer to their gates.

She had Gage, at least. Or she thought she did—for a time, it had been touch-and-go there, in the months when he couldn't look fully at her and moved through the days as if spooked. She'd put her foot down and told him to get himself together and decide which bed he wanted to warm, and that had worked, after a time. It seemed so, anyway. He was still uneasy about it all; skittish in a way she'd never imagined a man made of hard muscle and decades of raiding could be.

The everpresent weight in her stomach shifted, a foot pressing firmly against her lower ribs, and she grunted and arched her back slightly. "Poor thing's running out of room," Mackenzie had said and Aiko thought _poor me_.

She sat up with some struggle and stared dully out the Grille's newly fortified window—bulletproof glass looted from a defunct army base; Gage had seen to that. The street lamps below glowed dimly and, if she squinted, she thought she could see Disciples milling about beneath them. She rested a hand on her stomach where an errant limb was jutting, tenting her skin, and exhaled because a few more weeks and she'd trade one misery for another.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. There was a cloying attachment whether she voiced it or not, but she thought, _That's not enough_.

"Boss?" Gage asked groggily, rolling over, and resting a warm hand on her thigh. "You okay?"

"Can't sleep," she managed, hand trailing after what she had decided was almost certainly an elbow.

"It's not, uh-"

"No, no. I'm fine."

He rested his nose against her side and sighed, hand awkwardly sliding up to her belly, as if unsure if he was permitted, and she took it, pressed it flush against her. The baby stretched and she felt vaguely nauseous over the upheaval.

"No shit you can't sleep," he muttered and she felt a sort of strange warmth then, if only because he had been adrift for months on end, if only because the first time he had finally felt the kid moving, he'd looked fit to vomit and jerked his hand away.

Small steps. She'd take what she could get. Before, any acknowledgement of their bungle had been the wordless kind: a custom piece of armor he'd quietly drawn up himself, toast when she'd been sick, cigarettes smoked out on the lift when the stink of them made her gut reel.

He slipped his hand under her oversized nightshirt and pressed gently above her navel.

"Something hard there."

"Knee, I think."

"Hm."

"You okay?" she tested carefully.

"I'm fine." He pressed his mouth over her hip bone and made her skin prickle.

They lapsed into a soft quiet and she knew she loved him not only because he was there. She caught those words between her teeth before they could emerge, knowing how he flinched against softness. Instead, she sank back down, facing him, and leaned across the gap her stomach forced between them to press her lips to his. 

It wasn't supposed to be like this, but it was and that was all.


	24. RedEye

_"Oh, true, fine mama, she's really on the ball.  
_ _Yes, true, fine mama, she's really on the ball.  
_ _She hears my every plea, come to my beck and call.  
_ _Oh, come back, baby, don't leave me here,  
_ _Come back, baby, don't leave me here,  
_ _You know that I love you, don't disappear."  
_ _ — Little Richard, “True, Fine Mama”_

* * *

**October 14th, 2310 AD.**

"Say it again."

"Boss—"

"If you're positive, say it again."

"Are you kidd— I never saw or heard a fucking _thing_. You think I don't want to find my kid?"

Aiko is leaning stiffly against the metal desk in the back of his station, ankles and arms crossed. She's got him fixed with a glare that makes him feel like he's being pinned in place to a foil dissection tray, the kind that Mackenzie had cracked out some years ago to show the kids how to gut a frog. (Waste of time, he'd thought back then; plenty of those kids already knew what a human looked like turned inside out. Or maybe he just resented it because Griffin, for all his fondness for taking tech apart, had been reduced to tears when it was done to a living thing. The doctor had dropped the chloroform soaked cotton balls into the jar with the frog to suffocate it and he'd cried until his peers had taken turns mocking him).

Aiko relents after a second, her face softening, as if her better senses have caught up with her and she's remembered that he's not the reason a bevy of Nuka World brats have gone missing. He gets it, though—you always want some poor sap to blame.

"Sorry, no, I know... Of course you do."

Her shoulders sag a little: a minute movement that she'd never let happen in front of most, but he's had her back for long enough that most pretenses have been shed. He's been in her corner since she'd cleared the last park and turned on the lights. Kept food on the table for sure; got him a nice little station and trailer built and ensured that he wasn't likely to get thrown off of Fizztop anytime soon. Pomp and circumstance aside, he'd never been much of a brawler and his so-so aim had gone more or less to shit over the past couple decades, but he'd always known how to cow to the ones in power without looking like too much of a sad sack, how to seem like you're not a serious threat to the ones on top and not easy pickings for the ones below.

Still, he hopes she doesn't slip up and look like that in front of anyone else except him and Gage—in Nuka World, how you hold yourself is as important as how you pick your words and where you stick your knife.

"He didn't act weird or anything before—"

"Boss, I told you: nothing. I mean, he went to bed kinda early but that was it. We had _plans_ for today, for fuck's sake." He ignores the ache this seeds in his stomach. "It's a card night."

"Ahmya went to bed early, too." Aiko's staring down at the toes of her boots, her forehead creased, and he realizes she's digging her fingernails into her arms. "Didn't even leave a note."

He shifts awkwardly. "Maybe one of them did. We know everybody who's gone?"

"Not yet. I've sent word to the bosses to get a headcount." There's a heaviness in her voice that scares him a little. "I know ours aren't really _kids_ anymore, but—"

"But they still don't know shit."

"And they've left like they do."

"No guesses why?"

She shakes her head. "Gage says logic would dictate they wanted to feel grown and strike out on their own, but that's just not Ahmya, you know? I mean, I always figured she'd leave one day, but not like _this_. And there's at least two actual kids with them, from what I've heard. You don't start a gang with a fucking eleven-year-old."

"Some assholes might be dumb enough to try."

"Sure, but Ahmya has more sense than that and you know Griffin does, too."

He rubs the back of his neck and cracks out a cigarette, gripping it between his teeth as he spins the wheel of his lighter. With a deep breath, warm smoke and tar floods his lungs. He almost wishes he'd just suffocate on the spot.

"Then what?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe they _were_ planning on striking out on their own, but kids found out and threatened to tell or some shit unless they brought them along." Nicotine has started humming through his veins but he stills feels like he's all edges. There's a gnat that keeps flitting into the station's window pane and the storm cloud of a headache is starting to form in his skull.

"Maybe." She sounds entirely unconvinced and they just stand there, for a moment, in silence, neither looking at the other.

"Gage out looking?" he asks.

"Not yet. We want to figure out where to start first."

"We'll find 'em, Boss."

She doesn't answer, just straightens up and gives a nod before heading for the door. "Send out the alert, Russell."

* * *

**January. 2291 AD.**

She came on the back of a brahmin cart, white-blonde hair held in a messy bun by an auxiliary cord.

He thought she looked kind of sick when he first saw her: moon-pale with wide, blue eyes and a scrawny frame. Her lips were chapped and there were bags under her eyes. Just another Jet tweaker, he figured, come in on the huge tide of new traders.

Overboss Aiko had swept into Nuka World a few years prior like a storm and, with a bullet to Colter's head and some hard assing, turned the place into real hot shit. And now, while Diamond City and its ilk were still struggling to piece themselves back together in the wake of the Institute War, the gangs had managed to weather it all. Some folks had died, sure, but that was just another day around these parts. Shit wasn't going to collapse and people weren't going to lose their heads unless it was the bosses who were taken out, and Aiko had prevented that by battening down the hatches and sending bodies to aid in the Institute's destruction.

They'd come out all right, even when weird pitfalls had come into play—you couldn't convince him that the Boss had intended to go and get knocked up, especially not by some grouchy, beat-up bastard like Gage—and now folks flocked to them as if people didn't regularly go missing in the parks' back alleys, as if they weren't a colony teeming with raiders armed to the teeth.

Desperate times, for some, he figured. Hedonism for the rest.

The cart the pale chick came in on was mostly laden with produce and random bric-a-brac and pulled by a brahmin missing an eye. She was at the beck and call of a stout, red-faced man who more barked at her than spoke. Farmers, he figured. Wouldn't last long if they tried to cut raw deals or wander around the park at night.

He strolled past, eying some stunted melons and slabs of salted venison, because kissing the Overboss's ass paid well and, fuck, it was nice to have food you didn't have to tear out of a can for a change. But it was the cord in her lank hair that really caught his eye. Bright blue. Good condition.

He gestured towards it. "You, uh, wouldn't be selling that by any chance, would ya?"

She paused, blinking slowly at him like she'd never heard English before. Her boss was trying to haggle with a increasingly agitated Disciple. "My hair?"

He snorted. "No, the AUX cord."

"The what?"

"The thing _in_ your hair."

Another slow blink. She had really weird eyes. Even when she was looking straight at him, she didn't seem to be focusing, like her mind was miles off. When she spoke, her voice was soft and airy with a broad Commonwealth accent. "The wire?"

"Uh, yeah, it's an AUX cord. You plug it into amps, like for--"

"Ohh, music."

"Yeah. You up for selling it?"

She glanced over at her boss, who, floundering a bit in his negotiations, seemed ignorant to them. Her voice went low. "I am if you'll pay me and not him."

"Skimming some off the top?"

She smiled in a strange, dreamy way that didn't seem to fit her intentions. "Something like that."

"Yeah, sure."

"But first, you have to tell me what it's for."

"Well, you know the Nuka World radio station?"

"Yes."

He grinned and squared his shoulders slightly. "Yeah, that's me."

"_Oh_, you play the guitar."

"Well, I mean, that's _one_ thing I do. I basically run everything for the station and I've got a cord on its way out so..." He pointed at her bun again.

Same dreamy smile. "The station out front?"

"Uh-huh."

"Tell you what: I'll bring you the cord tonight, once Lewis hits the rotgut, and you can pay me then."

"All right. How much for it?"

"Seventy caps."

"_Seventy? _Fuck off. _Twenty_."

"Fifty."

"Thirty. I ain't going any higher."

"Thirty-five and a song."

"Huh?"

"If you play me a song, I'll take thirty-five."

It was his turn to blink, confused. "No shit?"

Her smile returned. "No shit."

* * *

She showed up just before midnight with a crate of lukewarm beer and the AUX cord still in her hair. When he opened the door to his trailer, she stepped past him and walked right in like she owned the place, not in the gruff, raider way he was used to. No, she more just drifted in, like she'd always belonged.

She cased the room, looking at his records. "Wow."

"You, uh, like music?" A stupid question, but he felt strangely uneasy.

She set the crate of beer on the floor, opened one on her belt and took a swig. "I love it."

"Oh... cool."

She opened a second bottle and passed it to him. "How about that song?"

"Yeah, right, sure."

He threw the beer back and sat awkwardly down on a stool by the kitchen sink, picking his guitar off the floor. "You got any requests or--"

"Do you know 'Coal Miner's Daughter?'"

"Uh... no, sorry."

"How about some Willie Nelson?"

He shrugged. Name rang a bell but that was it. Some kind of honky tonk singer, if he remembered right.

"Kenny Rogers? Patsy Cline?"

"No and no."

She tilted her head, looking baffled. "What _do_ you know?"

"Only the _best._" He leaned back slightly, strumming out an overly dramatic and slightly out of tune lick, waggling his eyebrows.

"_Only_ rock 'n roll, then?"

"Hey, I like some jazz, too," he said a little too defensively.

"You know 'Tutti Frutti?'" Maybe it was the buzz of the beer settling in, but he was starting to think maybe she _didn't_ look all that sick. Maybe she was pretty in a strange kind of way.

"That," he said, tuning his guitar. "I _do _know."

When he played her that song, it was with sweat on the nape of his neck and his nerves all tangled up. He played it harder and better than he thought, maybe, he'd ever played anything, if only because she sat cross-legged on the floor and watched him in a way no one ever had before. It was like she thought he was the most interesting person in the world.

When she gave him another beer and that funny, dreamy smile, told him that she played banjo because her father had hailed from West Virginia, he played her “Kansas City.” And when she said she thought music said more than talking ever could and even bad music was better than silence, he played her, “True, Fine Mama” and thought, maybe, he'd ask her to bring her banjo around next time she came to the park.

And, when they swapped the cord and caps and the beer ran out, she told him her name was Loveday and kissed him sore and dumb.


	25. Mags

**(Warning: Graphic sexual content).**

* * *

**July. 2288.**

Melker Bergström did not walk into Nuka World so much as he drifted in like vaper, quiet and slow and barely worthy of notice. He later told her that he wandered through Nuka Town in the balmy twilight, perusing the shoddy stalls and wire tables of the market, stopping at Cappy's for a mug of lukewarm coffee and some of Plummer's radstag chili. Then, he had just paced, peered into newly opened up storefronts that, under Aiko's watchful eye, were in the midst of renovation; reclined in a lawn chair near the swan pond and watched a Disciple puke into a dead bush. At a lean six-feet with rifles strapped to his back and a pistol on his hip, he had felt the heat of the guards' eyes on him as he passed underneath overhead walks and strolled past posts. He had been impressed at how well-stocked and guarded the park's heart already was, he would later tell her. He'd smelled something like change and promise in the air. 

Around dawn, he strolled up to the Parlor and politely informed the guard outside that he had heard much ado about the Operators and was interested in enlisting. The guard glassed him and, seeing that he had, at the very least, well-kept guns and the carefully maintained aesthetic of a would-be Operator, had him check his guns at the door, patted him down and sent in word to William without much thought.

He'd always had a flair for the forgettable. Only as remarkable as he needed to be to get through the front door. 

She was pinning her hair and loading her rifle when William let him in, telling him to take a seat at a side table and wait. Standard procedure—even if they weren't busy, they liked to remind recruits of their insignificance, to make them sweat. William returned to his room as she emerged from hers, their paths not even intersecting now that he seemed to have set up shop with Lizzie. A strange development that she supposed she would have seen coming if she had remembered her brother could want anything beyond their bottom line.

Now, only trusted veterans still bunked down in the Parlor with William, Lizzie and herself, the rabble dispatched to the Galactic Zone and Scrapyard. Their main trade coordinator, Ryuu, was leaning against the door frame of the sleeping quarters, idly smoking a cigarette, and two squad leaders, Jacob and Marie, were quietly shooting pool. She nodded curtly to them in acknowledgement, almost overlooking Melker, who was tucked away at a corner table.

New blood, she figured. Handsome—notably so—with a sculpted jaw and the kind of blue eyes fools might pine for. He had clearly done his damnedest to look presentable, dressed in gray slacks and a worn, blue button up with his blond hair tapered into a neat high fade. He gave her a small, closed-lipped smile before glancing at the refurbished grandfather clock across from his table. She approached him stiffly; her night's sleep had been an poor one and the storm of a headache was brewing behind her eyes. Not in the mood for some blowhard fool that thought a pretty face and pressed shirt would get him anywhere.

When she approached, he quickly stood, extending a hand that she made no move to receive. From money, she guessed, based on manners and dress alone, or at least pretending to be. Not Upper Stands breeding, though; she would have remembered his face.

"You are?"

He awkwardly retracted his hand, smile almost losing its footing. Nervous underneath it all, then. His voice was deep with a strange, sing-songy accent she couldn't seem to place. "Melker. Melker Bergström."

"And you're here for..?"

"I was, uh... hoping to see if your boss was recruiting."

"I am the boss," she said flatly. "We hire talent as we see it."

"Ah." His gaze flitted away for a second. "Yes, well, I have plenty of that. I am one of the top marksmen in—"

"We look for more than a good shot."

"Sure, of course, but I have been a mercenary almost my whole life," he offered almost too insistently. "Guns and explosives, I know. Recon, scores, hits--you give me a job, I finish it. _Never _am I leaving a job undone."

She let him stand in a tense silence for a moment. "Where are you from?"

"Nya Malmö. It's an island just off Canada's eastern shore."

"That's a Canadian accent?"

He glanced awkwardly to her left. "Not really. Uh, my people, they came from Sverige after the War and Nya Malmö... it doesn't change much."

"Sverige?"

"Sweden."

"Ah." If Diamond City had been of any use it had, at least, leant her an education beyond that of most Commonwealth rubes. She knew enough to remember Sweden was across the ocean, in what had once been called Europe. Cold, if she remembered correctly. Long winters. "Why the Commonwealth?"

"Jobs moved me around. Ended up here. I was feeling, what is it you say—I wanted to stay in one place for a while. So, I get here and I hear of an outfit that could be a good fit."

She pursed her lips. Wandering was something to be wary of, a common signifier of someone running from failed ventures and mounting debts. "Long way."

She eyed his weapons. High end, well-maintained. They weren't necessarily _lacking _in numbers, but their ranks had been flagging behind those of the Disciples ever since Nuka World's lights came on. Bloodthirsty nutjobs, clearly, were easier to attract and collect than professionals of any merit. "How long have you been working?"

"Twenty years."

She blinked; he looked, in truth, no older than her. "How old are you?"

"Thirty-six."

"Old for a wandering merc."

"Yes, usually they don't last so long."

That got a small smile out of her, if nothing else. Melker, at the very least, seemed uninterested in selling himself beyond what he was. Someone lowkey but self assured, she figured, was better than a pompous clown with something to prove. "Fair enough." She crossed her arms. "We have, as I'm sure you're aware, a reputation to maintain."

"Yes, it's why I'm here."

"To put it plainly: people seek to do business with us because they know we get things done quickly, quietly and professionally. If they want grandstanding, they go to the morons in the Pack. If they want bloodshed, they go to the Disciples. But for actual results? They come to us."

He nodded slowly, but said nothing, watching her expectantly. Someone who knew when to shut up and listen; another tick in his favor.

"We have a two strike rule here. You botch a job once, you lose your pay. You botch a job twice, well... you won't have a chance for a third try."

Another nod.

She glanced him up and down. Lean but hardly scrawny. Ropy scar on the underside of his jaw suggested some degree of hard living. It couldn't hurt to test him out; not really.

"New recruits we deem worthy have to pass a test. We give you a job for to you complete, unassisted but supervised. As your luck would have it, we have some clients in need of... extrajudicial justice. Barely a test for anyone worth their salt. One mark, no witnesses."

"Where?"

"Your, let's call them a _proctor,_ will lead you where you need to go and give you all the details when you arrive."

"I can do that," he said, any slight unease having bled away. "You put me in a crowd and point, say no one can see, then no one sees, but the mark still goes down."

"I look forward to hearing more than just your word," she said coolly, turning on her heel.

* * *

**October. 2290. **

Nobody saw.

And the marks went down.

Again and again, one after the other. Dominos.

It didn't matter what kind of job she slid across the table, where she sent him or what she demanded, Melker proved countless times that if he was anything, it was an honest professional. Clever, too, and more resilient than his pretty face may have suggested, surviving close scrapes and more than a few brutal beatings to come out the other side with his work unequivocally finished.

He got a reputation for himself that had William tolerating him and younger Operators clamoring for his advice and attention. Shot the wings of a blowfly at an impossible amount of paces. Regularly took out multiple men through single well-angled shots. Reduced dozens of super mutant suicide bombers to smoking pillars of ash with a single squeeze of the trigger. And, somehow, through it all, he rarely broke a sweat. Calm, collected and almost unnaturally polished, he could watch a man's skull burst through his sights one second, then lean back and look like the cover model of some glossy Old World magazine the next.

Girls vied for his attention; some men, too. Mags took tallies and gave him raises and found herself not minding terribly when he was hanging around. Friends were not an investment she saw as terribly wise. Outside of William and Lizzie, she spent little time concerning herself with the personal lives of her underlings, but Melker proved himself to, at least, be above the other rabble. He was reliable counsel—quick to listen and slow and cautious to give advice—with almost a decade of experience on her but enough wisdom not to press or condescend her.

Rarer still, though, was his ability to, on occasion, even make her laugh.

When she named him a veteran after only two years and some change, she was sure some had quietly balked, but if there had been another deserving of the title, they'd failed to show themselves to her. Better jobs found their way to him and, when he wasn't stalking marks across the Commonwealth, she had him shadowing her as a personal guard.

In his company, at the very least, she didn't find herself wanting to tear her hair out or a pack a bullet between his eyes.

It had been as simple as he had seemingly promised. She pointed, he shot, and the years went by.

* * *

**February. 2291.**

"Yes or no?"

She was leaning against her vanity table, the bulbs that framed her mirror buzzing faintly, and Melker was seated in a highbacked, faux-velvet chair across from her. He was leaning forward, hands between his knees, and looked sightly ill beneath the sickly light—or, maybe, it was her proposal having that effect.

"Why?"

"The Operators have a future, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes."

"A long one, should things continue along this current path. One worth securing."

"Yes," he repeated, but he wouldn't meet her eyes.

"So, an heir is a sound investment. Think of it like... insurance."

He pursed his lips, jaw clenching, and stared at the floor. He went quiet like this, sometimes, and she was never sure if it was simply the result of him sifting through a foreign language to find the right words, or also a sign of his consideration. "This place, it's not... the right kind for a child."

"Oh, please, it's one of the most secure places in the Commonwealth."

"Safe from _outside_, yes."

"You've guarded me more than sufficiently."

"Yes, but—"

"There are other children here."

"Not many."

"But some, and they've survived so far."

"If this is because of Lizzie," Melker offered carefully, "there are other ways to find uh... purpose."

Mags bristled. "You can't seriously think I'm following _Lizzie's_ lead."

"It's just a bit of a, uh, how do you say... obsession for her."

"Which has nothing to do with me."

He glanced up at her, tense. "Why me?"

"You're one of the best we have."

"That gets one a pay raise, not a child."

"You've never disappointed me. Perfect track record, no infractions, unquestioning loyalty."

"Again, as I say: pay raise."

"If that's your concern, then I'd be happy to offer an incentive."

"Mags," he started in that low, weary way that no other Operator would ever dare use with her. "That's not what I want. It's just—"

"I trust you," she cut in flatly. The admission felt not dissimilar to when she had had a tooth extracted as a child, her mother convinced that the crowding in her mouth would misalign her smile. She ran her tongue over where other teeth had shifted to fill the gap. "I know you won't disappoint me."

He looked only further rattled. "Me?"

"I made you a guard for a reason."

He sighed, running his hand through his carefully tended hair. "You're acting like this is a business transaction."

"Is it not?"

The look he offered her was one she had never seen before. Something like shock, like _doubt_, and it made her gut ache. For a moment, she questioned her own selection. "Of course it's not."

"I've already told you that you can say no."

He laced his fingers together and cleared his throat uneasily. "Say I say 'yes,' how would we, uh..?"

"If I have to explain that to you, I've clearly overestimated your intelligence."

"No joking right now. It's just a bit odd, yes?"

She shrugged but quietly tried to remember the last time she'd even troubled herself with finding someone to warm her bed. Seven years? Eight? Sometime back when she was young and still drunk on her freedom from Diamond City and hedonism of the raider world. She had spent years prior ignoring the boys in the Upper Stands as they made fools of themselves in a bid for her affections, her attention, some nonexistent chance that she'd subject herself to their sloppy kisses and backalley fumblings. Perhaps, though, young her had supposed, there was a reason for their pathetic desperation, for the same way even raiders grappled for the touch of another, bearing their throats in the worst of ways. Maybe she just needed to work backwards, to complete the act first and find the reason second. 

Ultimately, she had fucked a handsome enough raider boy who had, unlike most of the rabble, known what soap and toothpaste was. He'd come from some sudsy-clean settlement called Covenant, though why she remembered that now, she couldn't be sure. It had been awkward and brief and, quite frankly, dull. He had been all thumbs and gotten drool on her chin. Unimpressed, she'd sought the company of different men, then women, and found only marginally better results. It had felt nice enough, at times, but no want, no _need _led her to them.

All hype and no pay off, like Jet. A distraction ill-fit for her.

"You there?" Melker asked, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

"Just thinking."

"Would want to, um..." he trailed off. "Time it, uh, right, I am guessing, when it would be most... efficient."

"I'll be ready shortly."

They lapsed into a long silence before he spoke again, "Can I be honest with you?"

"You usually are."

"That is the least sexy thing a woman has ever said to me."

* * *

They fucked three days later in the middle of the night.

Once the other Parlor residences had retired to sleep, or else wandered off into the flourescent lit night to chase vice, Melker arrived awkwardly at her door. She played the part: slipped into a navy blue cocktail dress that had been gathering dust in the back of her armoire for years, poured him a glass of wine, let the hem of her skirt ride up over her knee as he pretended not to look. He lit a cigarette that he barely smoked and tried for small talk, until she grew bored with the pretense and simply told him to take off his slacks.

He stiffly obliged and, when she straddled his lap and settled a hand on each shoulder, his breath had smelled like wine and ash. She had resolved not to kiss him some hours prior, but anything was better than his desperate struggle to fill the silence, so she broke her own promise and did what needed to be done. It was better than most of the raiders from all those years ago, she reasoned; not desperate or disgustingly wet. As polite and careful as anything Melker did, really. He settled his hands on her waist, then let them slide under her skirt, resting on her thighs.

He leaned back. "Do you, you know, have anything you... like? Or don't?"

"What?"

"Something I should do?"

"Not particularly."

"Okay," he said, one hand remerging from under her skirt and journeying to the buttons that marched up her spine. "Can I take this off?"

His heart was thrashing in his chest. She almost pitied him.

"Yes."

For a moment, he struggled to free the buttons from their cloth loops, before, annoyed, she simply yanked the entire dress over her head and tossed it to the floor in a heap. Her skin goosepimpled against the cool winter air that had managed to worm its way into the Parlor and he leaned forward, kissing her neck, her shoulder, the tops of her breasts. A waste of time, she thought briefly, though not entirely unpleasant. His hands slid to her ass, but he was almost too polite to properly squeeze it, and, when she tugged off her panties and unhitched his boxers, he didn't even glance down.

"One second," she said, frowning, and rose off of him to dig through her chest of drawers for the mason jar that Lizzie had unceremoniously given her days prior. Water and corn starch, she had been informed, would get the job done.

"What's that?"

"Lube."

He cleared his throat as he always did when embarrassed or uneasy, and she unscrewed the lid, scooping out a handful. "I imagine you'd want me to do it?"

"If you... would like." His face had taken on a red tinge and she climbed back onto his lap to apply it, breathing against the shell of his ear in that way spank magazines always seemed to think men liked. It seemed to work—he shuddered.

Without thinking, she asked, "Is this all right?"

He gripped her waist for the first time with any real vigor, drawing his nose along the curve of her jaw, breath warm and voice sounding vaguely strangled. "Yes."

A sharp pain daggered through her groin as she sank down onto him, biting the meat of his shoulder to stifle a gasp, and he groaned in turn, guiding her into a smooth rhythm when she failed to find her own. He'd done this before, she realized, with a rare flinch of embarrassment, and not as she had, with only a handful of excursions to her name. He kissed her throat and rocked into her with a kind of steady ease that felt practiced, his touch so spectral it was both barely there and too much at once, making her shiver despite herself. At some point, as she pondered which Operator girls he'd paid any mind, he slipped a hand between them and dragged a long finger up her clit so slowly it almost felt lazy, lackadaisical. She panted slightly against a tangle of unfurling static in a way that felt almost foolish, but he said not a word, just adjusted the angle of his hips to better sink in and draw out, sink in and draw out.

Still, she felt no deep seated need at the sight of him, handsome as he was; no strangling want that made her toss back her head with abandon or clutch at him until it seemed as though they'd cleave together into a single, writhing mass. Her first orgasm was small, unrolling like a thin sheet of thunderheads with little rain to its name, but it came all the same and, with her forehead sticking to his sweaty shoulder, she supposed, it felt nice enough. 


End file.
